sIFR as used in Fancy theme and gmap point label conflict

Last night I submitted a request (and a patch) for a feature that provides a hook which allows other modules can override the default node display in the google map pop-up labels. I was just awake enough to complete that submission, but not to go into the root cause of why I wanted to do such a thing.

The theme on my site uses a derivative of the Fancy Theme. Fancy uses sIFR to do some nice tricks with node labels. In simple terms when applied to node titles, it hides the underlying text and replaces it with a small flash display that fits over the node title. This allows much more interesting fonts on the site while still allowing indexing (the regular text appears on browsers that do not support flash, including web crawlers).

After several frustrating hours of futzing while wondering why my nodes only showed empty bubbles when I clicked on the gmap markers, I finally made the connection. Something in the sIFR logic was not playing well with the rendering of the bubbles. Sure enough, disabling sIFR on my whole site fixed the gmap label problem. sIFR does its magic when the page loads. I believe the problem here is that sIFR is not engaged when the gmap marker labels are brought up - sIFR has already swapped out css styles to make node title text invisible, but didn't create a flash replacement.

My solution was to use a different node rendering within the gmap_location module for the node map only on the node types that I cared to display. That's where the patch to allow modules to override their gmap label display came from - it may not be the only solution to my problem, but it worked. After adding hook_gmapnodelabel support to the gmap_location module, I altered a few of my custom modules to support that hook.

This is the back-context of my patch. I actually don't think there is much you can do about this directly (beyond apply the patch or propose/find a different solution). I thought it would be appropriate to write up both so that you can understand why I want such an odd patch, and second so that others who install the Fancy theme and gmap have a chance to find out what is going on when their node titles do not display.