John Kavanagh : Indie Web Developer

Not even a year ago, I spent a couple of days wrestling with Mark Davidson’s sIFR in an attempt to find a cross-browser compatible method of embedding custom fonts into a website I was developing, which the designer absolutely insisted could not use a normal web-safe font. Of course I very quickly gave up and reverted back to a PHP dynamic text replacement module - for all the great things that sIFR has done for the web developing community (and especially in reducing arguments between designers and front-end developers), it’s an absolute pig to get to work reliably across browsers and can really reduce the usability and loading of your site. Not good.

Cufón is a very similar technology or sIFR only based on JavaScript rather than Flash replacing out text with PNG images. Although it’s not a totally new idea (certainly I’ve been doing similar tricks with PHP for quite a while now), it’s a very stable implementation and is a lot easier to implement and use than sIFR ever was. Cameron Moll has done a really excellent write up about it here so I’ll not go into it in too much detail. Needless to say though, the same licensing and legality issues surround this as any other font technology: only use fonts that you own the rights to.

Cufón home page: Fonts for the People

Example pages from Cameron Moll