Mr. Speaker

It’s been a while since we’ve had some DHTML (Sorry, I mean, DOM scripting) action here, so I thought I’d get us back on track with some stupid DHTML tricks for your web page. Today I’ll be showing you the Strongbad-esque technique I’ve been employing around these parts: hidden popup images.

Have a browse at some of the more recent articles around here. Scan your mouse over all the words. If you find them, pretty images spring to life - adding form and colour to the page. Then, seconds later, they are gone. Leaving you - the reader - intrigued and amused.

So how do you do it?

Well, first some considerations to make popup images practical:

1. It’s got to be easy to add new images. Otherwises it’s not gunna happen.
2. It must provide a method of varying parameters on each image, for added wackiness.
3. It has to “gracefully degrade” if viewed on browsers that don’t support javascript.

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Businesses realised it in 1999. Bloggers realised it in 2004 - If you put something - anything - on the intraweb, gazillions of people will stream to it every day - drawn uncontrollably by some mystical intraweb force. This converts to MASSIVE ANNUAL SALES for business and MASSIVE INTERNET SUPERSTARDOM for bloggers.

The logic is simple - there are currently 957,753,672 people using the Internet. At any one time at least 1% of those users have to be reading my blog don’t they? That’s 9,577,536.72 people reading my blog - RIGHT NOW!

Well that was the logic behind the dot com boom anyhoo. But dot-com-crash hardened bloggers are much more realistic. They look at their stats - Not 9 million, but, you know - still like, 3000 page views a day or something…

On some days you learn something new every day. For me, today was like 20 of those every days.

Being a particularly delightful Sunday morning, I decided to look up the HTML4.01 specs on W3C. My findings shocked and amazed me.

Now, I’m not claiming to be some kind of know-everything-about-html guy… But I mean, I first learned HTML in like, 1993. I’ve outlived the BLINK tag; I was there during the days when tables where only used to display tabular data - before they weren’t, then were again; and it was oh-so-long-ago since I learned about TH, TBODY and TFOOT tags. Surely by now I would have somehow and somewhere seen everything? Surely!

Not even close. Running through the Index Of Elements of the specs turned handfulls of non-deprecated tags I ain’t ever heard of. I’ll list them from the most boring, to the the most interesting ones I found.

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