Comments on: Combining Yahoo User Interface and sIFR: Rich, Tabbed Typography

By: iain Sutherland

iain Sutherland — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 12:28:28 +0000

sIFR is an interesting tool and we have tried it in a few places as test installations. It can look excellent, however, we seem to have display issues relating to scaling especially when viewing the results in different browsers. Also, when testing the pages with the javascript turned off we do sometimes see both the flash and the html version of the text. We will persevere.

By: Mark Wubben

Mark Wubben — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 20:53:16 +0000

> For me, sIFR still isn’t quite ready for prime-time though. It’s slow if you have too many items on the page. It’s still tricky getting perfect leading. And the biggest issue is that it doesn’t scale sensibly: That is, if you change the pages text size, the Flash text doesn’t rescale unless you refresh the page. Yes, you could force it with some JS to check for an onresize event, but this should be part of the standard behaviour IMHO.

Slowness is mostly due to Flash, but okay. You can do leading in sIFR 3, I’m not a typography export but you now have the same leading as you can get from inside Flash itself. And, sIFR 3 supports page zoom in Firefox 3, IE 7 and Opera.

By: Steve

Steve — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 11:58:02 +0000

Update: the syntax highlighting plugin used by this post is available on our companion ‘braindump’ blog: http://tinyurl.com/23qnkt

By: Jenni

Jenni — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 15:42:51 +0000

You can see the difficulty with leading in the image used – ideally it would be tightened up, but the use of Clarendon really does lift the design and reflect the client’s brand values.

By: Jenni

Jenni — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 14:49:36 +0000

If you’re rocking the YUI you’ll love their blog http://yuiblog.com/blog/ It’s a bit hard core tech for me – but I was interested in the possibilities for easy pagination – and also how some developers are making use of YUI within AIR apps.

By: Telmo Carlos

Telmo Carlos — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 11:41:44 +0000

YUI is definitely a great library.

And you did a great job with it. Our websites are looking better and better.

The implementations get closer and closer to the original designs. It’s good for the brand and for marketing. Glad to see the implementation efforts to match the original creative designs are paying off.

Look forward for the next creative-technical challenge.

By: Trevor May

Trevor May — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 11:19:49 +0000

Very interesting article, Steve.

I agree with Matt that sIFR en mass is not quite ready for prime time – but it’s definitely improving. It’s also incredibly important that we keep experimenting with this kind of stuff so that when it *is* ready we already know what to do… Plus, experimentation very often reveals all kinds of wonderful new stuff to play with!

By: Steve

Steve — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 10:42:17 +0000

LOL – thanks Matt – glad someone noticed! ;) After a bit of digging, I couldn’t find a syntax highlighting plugin for WP that I liked, so I quickly knocked up a plugin that wraps the SyntaxHighlighter over at Google Code: http://tinyurl.com/2vpqca Happy to share my plugin, although it doesn’t fully implement all features of the Google SyntaxHighlighter.

By: Matthew Hill

Matthew Hill — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 10:37:02 +0000

Hey, this is a neat bit of code. Excellent work Steve. I’ve been playing with various JS libraries but haven’t tried Yahoo yet, I guess I should check this out.

For me, sIFR still isn’t quite ready for prime-time though. It’s slow if you have too many items on the page. It’s still tricky getting perfect leading. And the biggest issue is that it doesn’t scale sensibly: That is, if you change the pages text size, the Flash text doesn’t rescale unless you refresh the page. Yes, you could force it with some JS to check for an onresize event, but this should be part of the standard behaviour IMHO.

Out of interest, are you using a WP plugin for dislpaying code here? Which one — it looks lovely. :-)

By: Joshua

Joshua — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 00:40:02 +0000

for me as a designer i found this really interesting and i get it, if only i could code which i wont – leave it to the experts…. but for me a designer sIFR is typographic heaven because choice fonts can render as intended and yet you can still resize and get that text talking to google. bliss.