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Comment by hkuo | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps not appropriate for your app, but who knows, maybe? But this is my favorite UI that I've seen in a very long time. Just click on any of the content boxes.

http://spacecollective.org/projects/The-Total-Library

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That site has one of my pet peeves. At the top, there is a Flash element. Wanting to see the full site design, I allowed Flash to run on the page. What did I see?

Text.

Just text.

At worst, it would have taken a PNG to produce the same thing, but they decided to create an entire Flash app devoted to displaying some text.

I think they're using it for a cross-browser solution for rendering custom fonts. There's nothing wrong with that, though we'd be better served if they used a progressive enhancement strategy -- they're replacing a single space character with their Flash banner, when instead they should be replacing a text representation of it:

e.g., Instead of: <td id="flash_banner"> </td>

they should do this: <td id="flash_banner">project: The Total Library</td> (They use JavaScript to replace that <td> element with the Flash banner)

Actually I think this is one of those Flash-based font substitution tricks. Although I wonder why anyone would still use that now cufon is available...

Many (most?) commercial font licenses prohibit embedding fonts via Cufon or other non-Flash solutions.

Typekit, Fontdeck, etc. are helping to fix this problem, but it takes time.

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