Beginning DotNetNuke® Skinning and Design

Chapter 15. Using sIFR with DotNetNuke

In a traditional website production process, selected headers of a web page are expressed as image files embedded in the HTML content, sometimes called image-text files. An image-text file enables the display of fonts that are not installed on the visitor's operating system. It's simply a picture of the formatted word or phrase. The font specifications inside a CSS file are at the mercy of the visitor's operating system, which make image-text files a good alternative for showing a specific font on all browsers. CSS files generally specify well-known and widely distributed fonts. Depending on the size of the site, a designer might have to create a hundred or more image-text files. As a negative side effect, the practice of using image-text files discourages the work of copy editors who swoop in later and request small changes to the words inside the image-text files.

Scalable Inman Flash Replacement, or sIFR (pronounced siff-er), is a great technology for adding interesting fonts to a web page that might not be installed on the visitor's computer. This chapter explains how to add unique and distinctive fonts to a web page without going through the hassle of managing a series of image-text files or distributing rare fonts to the visitors of the website before they browse it.

The technology inside sIFR replaces selected parts of a web page with Adobe Flash content on the fly using the client-side resources of JavaScript, Flash, and CSS. The standard ...