On Apr 28, 2008, at 9:51 PM, fantasai wrote:
Křištof Želechovski 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/
