It’s official: Internet Explorer 7 has been officially released. I hope that this marks the beginning of a series of reasonably frequent and substantial improvements…to not just CSS support but more evolutionary additions such as SVG support. I can’t help but think that an aggressive IE will spur other browser developers on so we see the kind of competition and innovation we saw in the mid-90s.
Although the underlying capability has existed for years, it seems that within the last 12-18 months there has been an explosion of new Javascript libraries and widgets designed to support really slick web application features. One of the slickest is Lightbox JS by Lokesh Dhakar.
Lightbox JS (and Lightbox JS 2.0, the most recent and even more impressive incarnation) allows you to display large images in a web page without sacrificing real estate. Go give it a try to see what I’m talking about — it’ll be much easier to understand than an additional paragraph of my ramblings.
I thought the Lightbox capabilities would be a nice touch to an ASP.NET application I’m currently working on, so I set about trying to make a full-blown custom web control so I could just drag a Lightbox onto a page during design-time instead of mucking about in script. The end result was…satisfactory. I had a custom control that inherited from System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebControl and could be sized and styled and dealt with all the Lightbox JS-related items (scripts, stylesheets, images) as Embedded Resources.
But it still seemed clunky. So I was quite happy to stumble across Lightbox.NET, a very similar control developed by Javier G. Lozano. You can find the source as well as additional comments about the differences between the two approaches here.
Update (7/10/07): Fixed URLs. Additionally, Lightbox.NET is now a project at CodePlex and may be found here.