Sorry for the popups

Tuesday, 14 October 2003

I feel it necessary to apologies for the popups which have until recently been gracing this site. Implemented in JavaScript, even worse. I apologise for this hypocracy; I had not read the source code nor used all aspects of this site enough to realise that the default MovableType code made use of these. There may be some more left.

Why do I dislike popups/new windows so? They remove a feature. In most browsers, it is possible to manually decide if you want to get a link to open in a new window. It is, however, not possible to decide if you want a link to open in the same window if the website designer has chosen to override this. It means that you can’t assume what behavior will happen. I would like to assume (while browsing the web) that left clicking opens the link in the same window and middle clicking opens it in a new window. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Sure, I’ll survive. But you’ll have to put up with my whingeing till you get rid of it. It’s only fair—you annoy me and I’ll annoy you.

Comments

Some things are suited to popups - I think comments are one of them. It's useful to be able to review what you are commenting on for a start. UI consistency has it's place but in the wild west that is the web it's far too much to be asking for.

Full page new windows on the other hand I entirely agree are an absolute pain.

Hmm... Well, if you like commenting to be in popups, it'd make more sense to choose to open it manually so. You can always override not opening a link in a new window (I don't know of any browser that supports windows that doesn't have an open-in-new-window option). On the other hand, the reverse is not possible, at least not in most browsers. And for some reasons if you chose to open a javascript popup in a new window, it doesn't work. You'd think asking it to do the same thing as it was going to anyway would work, but it doesn't...

Ah but it's more the size of the window. Open new window is usually max size or the size of the existing window, whereas things like the comment box are exactly that - a small unintrustive box that allows you to dash off a comment and see what you're writing about. The bigger issue i have with popups like that is they break in new tabs.

As I currently have it set up, you can see the reply (though you have to scroll, but you always have to scroll in everything else (I'm wondering why webbrowsers don't have a split window feature like Word's had since at least version 6.0)); not every layout permits having a 'small unobtrusive window' and the text both visible at the same time.

(You gotta love being the bossman and being the only person who can edit posts here :)

Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are `It might have been.