- From: Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt@myrealbox.com>
- Date: Sun, 4 May 2008 22:45:12 +0100
On Apr 28, 2008, at 9:51 PM, fantasai wrote: > > K?i?tof ?elechovski wrote: >> >> How about target="_guide" instead? A reference is usually lengthy >> and unreadable; the designer should know better than to treat the >> poor user with a reference. > > Or _notification. Most of what Matthew wants to use it for seems to be > notifications. I don't intend target="_reference" for notifications; that would be quite inappropriate. Firstly, a notification should appear unbidden, but if an author tried to use target="_reference" in that way, the popup blockers in legacy browsers would ensure it never appeared. Secondly, a notification is typically something you read once and then ignore, so it doesn't matter if it scrolls out of view, while part of the point of target="_reference" is to ensure the resource *doesn't* scroll out of view. And thirdly, it usually makes little sense for a notification to have a separate URL, but this is much more useful for help, terms of service, privacy policies etc. I intend target="_reference" for the purposes I actually described: help, terms of service, privacy policies, and (eventually) footnotes and endnotes. I chose "_reference" because that term roughly covers all those use cases. But if the name is confusing, which it may be, I'd be happy for it to be "_secondary" or something similarly non-specific. > How are you supposed to figure out the size of this thing? If it's > for footnotes and TOS and errors and help and what's-this all at > once.. > ... target="_reference" would be inappropriate for presenting errors, for much the same reasons as it would be inappropriate for presenting notifications. The exact presentation is up to the UA, of course, but I imagine a resizable pane at the bottom of the viewport, defaulting to about a quarter of the viewport height or about 12 em, whichever is smaller. (Ideally it would be sized based on the actual height of the linked resource, but that's impractical: impractical for internal fragments because you usually can't tell where the fragment ends, and impractical for external resources because -- just as with target="_blank" -- responsiveness would require showing the pane before the resource finishes loading.) Cheers -- Matthew Paul Thomas http://mpt.net.nz/
Received on Sunday, 4 May 2008 14:45:12 UTC