John said:
Have you looked at this:
http://www.accessify.com/tutorials/the-perfect-pop-up.asp
It's the best treatment I've found so far on the subject.
It's far from a perfect treatment in my opinion.
1- Bypassing standards
dynamically applying a target attribute in a strict DTD document has
been widely condemned by readers of that tutorial (at least, the K. Yank
article). Either standards are there to serve a purpose or they don't.
2- Anti-accessibility carelessness, counter-usability
"Console mode" and "fixed mode" imply that statusbar and/or window
resizability and/or scrollbars (if needed) won't be present, won't
appear. In my opinion, there will never be a single reason why these 3
window features should not be always present. If your requested window
dimensions are correct, then, as a web developer, there should be no
problem, no hesitation in providing window resizability and scrollbars
(if content overflows requested window dimensions) as a safe
accessibility fallback precaution in case of Murphy's law. If your
calculations are correct, then there is no harm, no problem in providing
these, so why not allow these features? This is precisely what is needed
(resizability and scrollbars to access content, for usability purposes)
when calculations are wrong or other parameters are neglected: e.g. the
user needs to use MS-magnify which reduces browser window viewport or
needs to increase font-size to a point that content overflows window
dimensions (that happens often with users over 40 years old) or
calculations neglects document margins (that occurs often with enlarged
images), etc.,etc.
The inability to scroll or resize a window is the most frequent
annoyance on the web regarding requested and unrequested popups. Both
Opera 7 and Mozilla give now users ultimate veto power over these
features. That accessify.com tutorial could have helped here by
preaching the example for developers targeting MSIE.
Why remove statusbar? Statusbar should be the user's best toolbar-friend
as it provides reliable, unaltered info (coming directly from the
browser) about browser connections, download, progress, http connection,
secure connection via the padlock icon (SSL), etc.. so, why do you need
to remove this toolbar away from the user? Would you trust a site which
enjoys removing statusbar all the time? If a content deserves another
secondary window, then why do you need to degrade the browser window
functionalities like that?
3- Bad code
The window popup generator creates bad code: it offers to support under
100 values for height and width. Cpu, time, RAM, user resources will be
wasted to produce valid sized (and possibly re-positioned also) popup
windows.
4- Incomplete
Some window attributes are not listed in there: the popup generator is
not complete. outerWidth, outerHeight, and many more are supported by
Netscape 4+.
5- No explanation
The explanations regarding popup killer softwares are far from being
accurate, useful and relevant. How popup killer software work and what
they do is never addressed in conjonction with the issue of popup coding.
6- The popup generator allows you to choose width and height of popups
according to screen res.: this is absurd as all window-based browsers
will need to waste time, cpu, RAM in reducing such windows and
re-positioning them. No window covers the window taskbar (or any other
os-dependent semi-permanent applications like MS-magnify, Office
quicklaunch bar, winbar, etc..) and no window should open clipped,
masked, outside the viewable browser viewport.
Another issue is that by making these as wide as the viewport (and that
will be the case after error-correction mechanism), the user with a
maximized window never gets to know that he's now in another window: so,
several of them will be confused by a grayed, dimmed Back button. None
of these issues are addressed.
7- No scalability
It is never discussed that window sizes can upset users: fullscreen or
maximized popup windows are a major irritations to users with large
monitor screen. It's never proposed to set window sizes proportional and
relative to browser window viewport dimensions or available screen size
for applications. E.g.:
window.innerHeight * 0.66
or
screen.availWidth * 0.50
The tutorial and popup window generator only offers absolute values.
DU
--
Javascript and Browser bugs:
http://www10.brinkster.com/doctorunclear/
- Resources, help and tips for Netscape 7.x users and Composer
- Interactive demos on Popup windows, music (audio/midi) in Netscape 7.x
http://www10.brinkster.com/doctorunclear/Netscape7/Netscape7Section.html
but I could not resist putting it in there because the facial