@Matt Davies: I don’t mean to speak for Jermayn Parker, but what I’ve assumed is that the developer didn’t bother to give any style to headings he intended to be replaced with sIFR, which is a mistake made by many.

@Rachel Maxim: Yes definitely keep your eyes on version 3 — their team is doing fantastic work and sIFR is getting better with every release.

On one site, after I used sIFR with a fancy display font for the headings, I realized that the font was distracting and using it didn’t add anything…So I took it out.

On another site, the structure of the CSS was rather poor, and it was going to be a pain in the butt to update it to accomodate sIFR in the right places. So in that case, I would say that you have to plan for it from the beginning (or really write good CSS), and often we designers aren’t lucky enough to work on a site from scratch!

I’ve also had my difficulties tweaking the settings so that it looks good both with and without Flash, and call me lazy, but I don’t always have the time to get it as perfect as I’d like it to be :) but I’ll have to try out v3.

The problem accord when the original designer did not take into account what it would look like if Flash was not installed on a browser….

Fred Perry Subculture

It worked very well as it enabled us to use the brands font within the website. Client was happy and so were we…

@J Phill: There’s no doubt about that. sIFR can give a website that extra ‘oomph’ and bring a design to the next level. In my personal experience however, I’ve seen implementations that were made for nothing but the sake of implementation. Using sIFR for blog headings makes sense to me as the wording will constantly be changing; not something I’d like to create an image for every time.

@Matt Brett: I thought that was pretty funny reading your post and seeing the same link. You should definitely keep your eyes on sIFR 3, as that crew is working really hard to make sIFR even more feature rich.

@trovster: That’s a really great point, and I agree. sIFR can be the perfect fit when it comes to a requirement of dynamics, and CSS based solutions are sometimes a better fit as well.

@Mark Wubben: Thanks for including the link, keep up the great work!

@Andrew: Wow! What a response! First and foremost thanks for taking the time to write up your thoughts. I totally agree that sIFR is an extremely powerful tool and I think we’ll be seeing more and more of it as the sIFR team continues to improve it.

I personally have not run into really any major limitations for sIFR, and I’m not even talking about the latest sIFR 3 beta, I’m still using sIFR 2.0.2.

Although beta looks promising, it’s still in beta, and I don’t feel comfortable using it at a production level just yet. If you need to break headings, but need those headings to be dynamic, set widths so that your actual text does break, thus your sIFR will break as well. Need a fancy font (which sIFR lets you embed 90% of fonts from my experience, and if you can’t embed the font you want, like Adobe Garamond, find something similar like Day Roman) on a patterned background? Use the transparent flash method. Although the instructions say to avoid this method, I test on IE6, IE7, Firefox 2, Opera 9 and Safari whenver I can get to a Mac and have never run into any problems. The only drawback is if you have links within your sIFR (which are also extremely easy) and you’re using transparent Flash, the link will not immediately be recognized with a changing cursor and hover state inside Firefox, but it will within IE. That is a limitation of all transparent Flash though.

Overall I can’t thank Mark, Mike, Shaun and everyone else who has been involved in sIFR enough. With the curent work that I’m doing, it is a godsend. I go all over the web and see text as images. Even with using image replacement, I can’t just copy and paste that if I wanted to. It just seems wrong to have text on the screen which I can’t interact with, why is it images?

Bottom line is sIFR is a very powerful tool that allows you to use good looking fonts throughout your site for almost anything, and it retains a semi-natural text behaviour, unlike image replacement.