web design question about image display

[ratcreature]

Back in ancient times (okay, three years ago or so) I used to have my website setup in a way so that images like sketches or fanart and such displayed in a new pop up browser window, because personally when navigating thumbnails that just open an image, not a real page, I like not to go away from the gallery page. However I then did a a poll on

Comments

[sholio]

This is just a personal quirk, but I actually loathe Javascript and Flash-based widgets of that nature. I want to be in control of my browsing experience -- I want to be able to open a dozen images in side-by-side tabs, or stop something from loading if I clicked on the wrong thing or if it's taking forever, or save a favorite image to my desktop without having to resort to a work-around. (I realize that many artists take steps to stop people from doing that last bit, and I can understand why, really I can -- but when I see something that I want to add to my folder of artistic inspiration, reference or just pretties, I'll do a screengrab if there's something blocking me from getting the original image, with a side dose of annoyance for the extra effort.)

After years of using tabbed browsers, I command-click to open a link in a new tab by habit anyway, so the back-button or popup thing is not an issue for me.

(Edited 'cause I broke my HTML.)

[ratcreature]

Well, I do the tabbed click as well, but that still works, so it's not like I broke that? I mean, you can still click to open it in a new tab and just the image will appear there, so I'm not sure whether it is actually my suggested site navigation you are complaining about here, or some other widget you encountered that breaks navigation.

It doesn't prevent saving the image either.

[sholio]

Actually, the tabbed click doesn't work in Safari. A tab-click just acts like a regular click and opens the Javascript window. It's understandable, because Safari is a bit of a weird browser and an unusual one, but that's the one where I do most of my LJ browsing, so that's the one I tested your page in. I just tried it in Firefox and while it does open a tab window, it also opens the Javascript window as well -- which means you have to wait for it to load and then close it before you can open another tab. It kinda works for my purposes, but I definitely like the other way better.

But ... heh ... I hadn't even tried "save as", because I'm so used to this sort of navigation NOT letting you do that. My mistake, totally -- you're right!

[ratcreature]

Weird about the tab thing. I use Linux and have it setup so that the middle mouse-click will open a new tab, and it worked in Firefox, Konqueror and Opera (opening the image in a separate tab, opening nothing in the main window), so it didn't occur to me that others might handle it differently. But that's certainly good to know and a consideration. I mean, I don't want to inconvenience users after all.

I loathe the weird things that prevent saving images as well, because they are such a pointless hassle, and I'm not against others saving my stuff anyway.

The only thing that caused me trouble was that the Firefox image resizing extension sometimes resized the image with distortions inside the javascript overlay.

[elynross]

I like the javascript, but I admit that I usually open things like this up in a new tab with a middle-click. *g* But I like that it works to open the image in the same page, *or* just operates the regular way, if you want. That multi-functionality seems to me the best of both worlds.

[ratcreature]

Yeah, I like that aspect as well, but it seems a lot of people prefer things plain.