Cufón – sIFR alternative

Cufón aims to become a worthy alternative to sIFR, which despite its merits still remains painfully tricky to set up and use. To achieve this ambitious goal the following requirements were set:

1. No plug-ins required – it can only use features natively supported by the client
2. Compatibility – it has to work on every major browser on the market
3. Ease of use – no or near-zero configuration needed for standard use cases
4. Speed – it has to be fast, even for sufficiently large amounts of text

Cufon: Fast text replacement with canvas and VML – no Flash or images required.

(via twittering jason santa maria)

5 Comments leave a comment below

  1. This seems promising, I would like to see this in action on text heavy sites.

    Khamis
    Feb 25th, 2009 / 4:44 pm

  2. Are there any websites showing it in action?

    It sounds like a cool alternative to sIFR, but if it generates the text in SVG, doesn’t that mean it can’t be highlighted? Will it clash with text-only readers if the reader still tries to process javascript?

    RJGNYC
    Feb 25th, 2009 / 5:33 pm

  3. Thanks for this tip. I tried it out. This is significantly easier than Sifr. But not being able to select the text is a bummer, but I can see this working in many situations. Wondering how the search engines see that text…

    Sam Lowry
    Feb 25th, 2009 / 11:02 pm

  4. Could’t the text selection issue be fixed with the same approach Apple uses for iwork.com.

    “The document itself appears to be an image file. To do selection, whenever I run over some text it appears that a Canvas element is created and a ‘highlighted’ type graphic is drawn over the correct characters.”

    http://ajaxian.com/archives/technical-details-behind-iworkcom

    John Anthony Evans
    Mar 1st, 2009 / 3:08 am

  5. I used this here: http://uxup.org/ in a bit of a mashup of another link I found here (the weather thing) in order to organize my friends for a little drinking extravaganza.

    1. Phenomenally easy.
    2. Still looks great with Javascript turned off.
    3. Loads quickly.
    4. Search engines read the text just fine, just like any other HTML.

    But the non-selectability (and the inability, as far as I can tell, to create rollovers) is definitely a bummer.

    But still very cool! Can’t wait to see where web typography goes in the coming years.

    Clay Parker Jones
    Mar 1st, 2009 / 12:05 pm