Dennis Willson wrote:[color=blue]
> Actually popups aren't evil in themselves: They're evil in
> the way there used.[/color]
It is unfortunately the case that some people will use scripting in an
abusive way, and that any browser facility that is significantly abused
will eventually be withdrawn or restricted (on way or another).
[color=blue]
> There certainly are perfectly valid reasons to use them.[/color]
That sentence should probably be moved into the past tense. Once pop-up
blockers of various sorts are a common reality you would need an absence
of alternatives in order to justify calling the use of a pop-up valid.
[color=blue]
> Unfortunetly they're used in an evil way so often that many
> people block them and therefore stop the legitimate uses of them.
>
> I have used them for context sensitive help on web pages,[/color]
For which the pop-up is not strictly necessary.
[color=blue]
> to issue warning that a user is about to do a dangerous thing,[/color]
For which the pop-up is not strictly necessary.
[color=blue]
> to gather or display additional information about an input
> field in a form, etc...[/color]
For which the pop-up is not strictly necessary.
[color=blue]
> The version of FireFox I'm using displays a message bar on the
> top to indicate something has been blocked and I can chose to
> allow it. But I have seen a couple of sites that seen to get
> their popups around the FireFox popup blocker, I just haven't
> yet taken the time to see how they're doing it.[/color]
Firefox has a notion of the 'requested' pop-up, being a pop-up that
results form direct user action. It represents a reasonable compromise
and many other pop-up blockers have their own notion of a 'requested'
pop-up (with very diverse mechanisms). Unfortunately these mechanisms
for providing a 'requested' pop-up have themselves been abused and so
are becoming more restrictive. And the existence of mechanisms that
allow some users to 'request' pop-ups does not reverse the reality that
pop-ups are no longer reliable outside of a controlled Intranet
environment.
<URL:
http://www.litotes.demon.co.uk/js_info/pop_ups.html >
Richard.