Siu Lun

So I was telling you how great a image text replacement library Facelift is. However, I’ve been dealing with it in the past couple of hours as there was bugs in the beta files.

After taking a look at the codes and also at the forum over at Mawhorter.net, I don’t mean to be prejudice but the code is not great and the creator doesn’t seem to be fixing much of the bugs in good time.

A huge amount of coding has problems with it and a lot of people have contributed fixes.

Anyway, it’s a project that seems to be maintained when I feel like it.

Not to mention, this is the killer part, that Facelift is licensed under GPL v3. I don’t think GPL is suitable for any web programming libraries, it needs to be LGPL or lesser restrictive and viral ones. AFAIK it means if you use Facelift you have to also make ‘avaliable’ the rest of the coding. Which just doesn’t work well.

Someone should do a better version.

Later

Facelift, it’s nothing new, been out for a while now, but why blog about it?

For one, I just want to give it more coverage, because it is a great alternative to SIFR, the other font replacement technique used in today’s websites.

I don’t think I need to advertise it more, if you want more information I’m sure you can look it up yourselves.

I do want to document a problem however with Facelift as I’m using it for a project at the moment.

Facelift currently does not work with PHP 5.3. This is because PHP 5.3 has a bug that prevents it from operating properly. More specifically it is to do with the bounding box calculation used in the GD library. This bug is supposedly fixed in the latest SVN but PHP has not yet released a production ready fix yet. So we have to spray and prey for now.

Later