Den Odell

Many are using sIFR on their sites these days – a smart technique for swapping out semantically marked-up headings and replacing those with a Flash movie displaying the same heading in a beautiful font of their choosing – some people just don’t want to use the standard browser fonts or use the image replacement technique (for user generated content, for example).

We came across an issue today where on a particular page on our site, sIFR was being used to replace 24 headings on the same page – a lot more than it’s recommended for – and some older machines running FireFox were encountering CPU usage shooting up to 100% and browser freeze.

We found we could eliminate this problem entirely by reducing the frame rate of the Flash movie down to 4 frames per second (fps) from its default 30fps – we decided on this value as this still allows the user to see rollover effects etc within a reasonable time.

Testing on the same machines saw CPU usage drop to just 2% and no browser freeze.

Just a little trick I thought I’d share in case anyone else was having a similar problem…

Microformats are great.

These are ways of marking up particular types of content in one’s HTML file in a machine-readable way that don’t break web standards – they don’t invent any new tags to represent their data, instead they take advantage of using particular names and values in the attributes of HTML tags to convey their meaning in a structured way.

For example, I could create the equivalent of a vCard (the standard format used by software and web address books) on this blog by marking up my name, address and mobile phone number using the ‘hCard‘ microformat. Another website or service could then access this page, recognise that I’m using that structure and pull out my details and use them safe in the knowledge that it can distinguish my telephone number from my name, my work address from my home address, etc.

Microsoft, Yahoo! and Google are all beginning to use these tags in their services and sites. Tim Berners-Lee likes them and has provided a means to convert them into the RDF format used in his Semantic Web project. Sites are beginning to spring up which will create a new user profile based on your user profile from another site, using this as the interchange format.

If a lot of others get on board too, it will only become ever more useful. I heartily encourage their use and will be building their support into my sites from now on.

Providing extra meaning to mark-up in this way is such a powerful idea.