As I read your mail I was going to suggest the hidden DIV with a
show/hide toggle button, then there it was at the bottom. I try to stay
away from popup windows where I can. When I've needed to do this, and I
you have enough space on the page, I've shown the help in a
nicely-formatted (light yellow, grey border) box to the right of the
field, rather than below, then when people toggle the DIV it doesn't
break the flow of the form if they leave the DIV shown. Depends on the
amount of text you need show, I suppose.

Chris

-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On
Behalf Of david
Sent: 13 January 2005 12:50
To: [email protected]
Subject: [WSG] Popups

Here's the situation:

I've got a form that users fill out in order to add something to a
database...

Under each <dt>, there's the <label for=""> element for each of the
input elements, and that works fine

But because of the layout of the page, the <label> values are kept
short, yes... there are title="" attributes, but IE and FF don't show
the whole text

So I was thinking about doing what other sites do... and thats to put a
"more info on this field" link, people click on it, and a popup appears
with the minimum of browser UI chrome and jumps to the right section in
the code

Ordinarily, this would be achieved with the help of JavaScript and
Window.Open(), so much for cross-browser compatibility.

Then there's the target="_blank" anchor attribute, but this is
disallowed by the DTD I'm using (XHTML1.1 w/ IFrame), that... plus it
doesn't offer a way to get rid of browser UI elements.

Does anyone have any alternatives?

I was thinking of having a JavaScript "show/hide" function with the
instructions and extra detail contained in a <div style="visibility:
none;"></div>
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