I really thought we were done with this. At least I thought that larger, more professional sites had changed. Browser sniffing. Locking people out of web sites due to their browser choice. What happened to presenting an unstyled page to those who choose a more current browser? What about screen readers?

Case in point -- National Geographic. As some of you know, I home school my sons. This morning, I was helping the eldest with some Grasslands research for Biology class. I Googled what appeared to be a great link. However, when I hit it, this is what I got:

Your Browser is not supported

The Following Browsers are supported:
Please download one of these free browsers and try again.

Netscape 4
Netscape 6
Internet Explorer 4
Internet Explorer 5
Internet Explorer 5.5
Internet Explorer 6

So rather than telling me my experience would be better if I were using one of these icky browsers, they choose to completely lock me out. Ahhh, but I'm one of those smart web developer types, right? So I just go to my little Web Developer's Toolbar, and I turn off JavaScript. They can't sniff without it! Now I'm all set to read. I refresh my page and voila! I have nothing. I have a completely and totally white page. Okay...

Final ditch effort. View Source. Wow -- the whole, entire, freaking page is loaded with JavaScript. There is no page without it. So they sniff and then they load. If they can't sniff, they don't load anything.

Yes, I have access to a PC. And yes, I went to the page and know that the main portion is an "interactive" map -- albeit a very slow clunky one. I wonder if they actually tested it in Moz-based browsers before they locked everyone except IE and NN out. Perhaps, they could allow the rest of the page to load? Maybe I'd like to see and use the sidebars, even if they've created something in the main area that no browser but IE and NN can handle? That would be swell.

The thing we've all been waiting for, the final release of sIFR, has finally arrived! Well, it's the thing I've been waiting for anyway. ;) And the release was while I was at TODCon in Las Vegas. Thus my delay in letting you guys know.

The new tweaks they've added are great. Mark and Mike even gave me something I requested a couple weeks ago -- the ability to use comma delimited selectors in the JS replacement calls. That's nifty! The Flash Block extension problems are worked out. They smashed a couple Safari bugs at the last minute. I was doing a session at TODCon on sIFR so they burned some midnight oil to get final files ready for me to use and distribute. These guys truly rock!

And now, due to their updated and excellent documentation, it's time for you guys to take this to your clients. It's time to rock the web with some new typography. I'll be adding sIFR to a large client site this week (I'll post the URL here when it's completed). I can't wait to really jazz things up. Pop over to the main sIFR page or Mike's blog entry about sIFR. There's also the wiki -- a useful place for you to leave tips and info for other developers as you use sIFR (with links to other sIFR resources as well). And finally, there's the sIFR forum -- just in case you need to ask a couple questions.

I'd love to see some of the things you do with sIFR, so leave me a comment or drop me a line at CMX.