This paper deals with families of conformal iterated function systems (CIFS). The space CIFS(X, I) of all CIFS, with common seed space X and alphabet I, is successively endowed with the topology of pointwise convergence and the so-called λ-topology. We show just how bad the topology of pointwise convergence is: although the Hausdorff dimension function is continuous on a dense Gδ-set, it is als...