R – displaying french content with sifr3

Fundamentally, this is an issue between the browser and the Flash player. As sIFR inserts the Flash movies into the page, the browser initializes the Flash plugin with the path to the Flash movie. If the movie is not yet in a local cache, it's requested from the server. Since the movies are inserted within a few milliseconds, this would mean that a request is made for each inserted movie.

sIFR tries to prevent this by prefetching the Flash movies. It does this ones per browser session, based on a session cookie. This merely fires off a request for the movie file, and hopefully that file is in the cache by the time replacement starts. Therefore its important to load the sIFR JavaScript code as early as possible, and to activate sIFR properly by passing the Flash movies to the sIFR.activate() method.

In my experience the only way to reliably test this process is clearing browser cache, closing all browser instances (to get rid of the session cookie), then opening the browser and going straight to the page you want to test. I don't find the activity monitors within browsers reliable, so either check through an HTTP proxy or the server logs.

The one remaining improvement I could make is to try and detect the progress of the prefetch, and hold off on replacing elements until the prefetch is complete.

The forceSingleLine parameter for sIFR.replace() is the easiest way to resolve this. The problem usually arises when the Flash text is wider than the HTML text, and the elements being replaced are exactly the width of the HTML text. In this case the sIFR text won't fit in the allowed space without wrapping.

Another solution is to use letter-spacing through .sIFR-active .myNavItemToBeReplaced CSS rules, to make the HTML text wider so the Flash text does fit without wrapping.