Re: [w3photo] To PopUp or Not to PopUp

"Greg Elin" <greg@fotonotes.net>
> Ben and Bryce have raised the question regarding not using popups when
> clicking on an image link from a thumbnail view.

I would say doing anything but using popups would be essential, with popups
being near universally derided, and having significant accessibility and
usability problems (they work fine if you close the window each time
perhaps, but if you don't and it's lost they're useless.)

We've seen great DHTML from you Greg, so I know you can do it, why not just
have "in page popups" where the images are placed in the page via DHTML
where supported (degrading to simple navigation, or similar if not.)

> I lean toward 2) and 3).  Both Gallery and the photo history of SIGCHI
> use popups to display the full photograph, which is what influenced my
> original choice. I personally think it avoids having to reload a page
> full of 50 or 100 thumbnails.

Sure that's a good thing, except of course there are plenty of solutions
which do use popups and achieve the same.

> But does the popup cause problems for accessibility? For tools we want
> to try?

Of course they do!  IE6 in XP service pack 2 coming out soon is rumoured to
contain a blocker, there's no point implementing something that people will
hate!  -  We also wouldn't recommend a user preference approach (on page
mechanism defaulting to off perhaps...) as chasing into the cookies and p3p
privacy policies necessary to do this with our mixed content pages (I'm
assuming images may still be hosted elsewhere, or at least the service
support such.)  Even without cookies are best avoided unnecessarily.

> I do really want to keep the popup for annotating part of an image,
> however. I have consistently found that feature elicits a smile and a
> light-bulb as a different way to think of images.

Or people never seeing it, I detest such a feature, (although I've not seen
it here, the Crewe-London train not currently having any wireless.) and
can't see how a popup changes someones interaction with an image.

Jim.

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Received on Tuesday, 2 March 2004 13:48:28 UTC