This article provides an extensive list Essential Pop-up Window enhancements that any web developer should be aware of. The article will mainly but not only focus on lightbox pop-up style solutions that have become incredibly popular.
Did you ever wonder who invented the lightbox pop-up technique? I think I tracked down the source of the “outbreak” that have been really a revolution in how web based interface are designed today. There may have been other similar attempts earlier but they didn’t start this change. (I’m not entirely sure – if you have further information on this please post a comment. ) Back in early 2006 Lokesh Dhakar created and shared a simple little javascript based script for bloggers that put an overlay with an image over the page loaded in the browser, he called it Lightbox JS. See his initial post here if you find this interesting in any way. The main idea of his contribution was to save the user from going to a whole new page to view an enlarged version of an image – essentially by emulating a modal window. Obviously this is really a briliant idea and it is used all over the web now in may different styles and implementations. It isn’t just used for showing a large versions of a thumbnail images. The technique have shown to be useful in many other uses and is for example used for configuration forms in the back-end of fx. Joomla and wordpress, for login and input forms on many websites, etc.
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Sun, Jun 14, 2009
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