After a break, I tried rewriting sifr3 again using method 2 from the previous post. It took about two days. The most significant bug was that jQuery calculated the height and width of the replaced nodes incorrectly. I didn’t get to using the jQuery flash plugin and there’s a lot of clean up that could be done, but it turns out Richard had beaten me to the punch and rewritten it as well. And done a better job.
I did find an IE bug in his code and fixed that pretty quickly. Once again jQuery was calculating something wrong. This time it was the font size. When jQuery retrieves any style properties it normalizes them to real values, usually pixels. The conversation was off by a significant factor in IE7 for some reason. Fortunately, the sifr3 flash movie can take ems, so the solution was simply use a generic computedStyle/currentStyle function (ignoring this brilliant-in-most-cases hack).
