SIFR, which was invented in 2004, is another way to render text that is not your bland, everyday browser fare. What sIFR does is very similar to image replacement, but it grants more sizing capabilities and allows the text to more succinctly blend into the content of a page as if it were written in the HTML of the webpage. It does, however, require a Flashplayer to render, which not everyone has, and it uses Javascript to over-write the HTML code if the appropriate player is installed.
“Like the Swiss designers who advanced the international style, Berners-Lee… strongly believed that good design and responsible use of technology would advance positive cultural change” (Dilger, 217).
sIFR is most closely a product of the side of the web-designing world which values the aesthetics and looks of their product over certain potential technological and efficiency drawbacks which could hinder certain other uses for it. Like the web designers who tried to advance the international style, the proponents of font-face and other more easily coded elements want the web to run as efficiently as possible, sometimes at the expense of the most unique or beautiful designs. They would side with Muller-Brockman who said he “acknowledged the importance of beauty, but insisted that ‘emotional’ creativity must be tempered with intellectual and rational discourse, lest designs fail to achieve their logical and systemic approach” (218). The program has been acknowledged as a little more difficult to get to render on all browsers, as it is basically a video, which is rendered using Flash (’s modern equivalent). But it does allow for more different options and often fewer legal entanglements.
Programs like sIFR foresaw the need for text which was itself expandable and contractible, at least as far as the space it was given. But it was technologies like this which paved the way for possibly future ones which can be more responsive to how we are viewing them. As more and more sites are being seen on different formats, everything from media to site grids themselves has to start thinking about creating more responsive options. And fonts are no exception. There is a movement to create responsive fonts, which won’t conform to the traditional 100-900 weight scale of normal fonts. Through new CSS coding, typographer Nick Sherman has put forward a proposal to create responsive font which would be able to expand and adjust with the size of the screen. Citing previous programs such as Adobe’s Multiple Master font format from the 90s, adjustable fonts would give programs better-fitting content and headlines and take up even less data.
Speaking for those of a certain feeling, the inventor of sIFR explained, “Do we like standards? Yes, we do. But will we sacrifice our own ability to create better work on the web because of them? No, we won’t. Well, some people will. I won’t”(Davidson).