Cufon looks promising:

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:

No plug-ins required – it can only use features natively supported by the client
Compatibility – it has to work on every major browser on the market
Ease of use – no or near-zero configuration needed for standard use cases
Speed – it has to be fast, even for sufficiently large amounts of text
And now, after nearly a year of planning and research we believe that these requirements have been met.

I like these ideas and I’m going to test it out on a site soon. I’ll probably do so here, before I attempt this on Spoke’s site (which is comprised of SIFR).

The two things I like about Cufon (and SIFR for that matter):

• The ability to use fonts regardless of them being installed on the web machine (less images)
• Easily degrade to specified fonts (instead of your site not working on a mobile client like an iphone).

One thing that has bothered me throughout the examples of Cufon is double-clicking on a paragraph of text doesn’t just highlight the text, it highlights the text near it as well.  Like this picture I snapped of highlighted text, it messes up just a bit. Something to work on, but if it degrades gracefully and works without flash installed, this would be an annoyance and nothing more. It looks promising.

No Responses to “Cufon – An Alternative to SIFR?”