Lightbox

I figured out how to implement Lightbox today, which is quite a neat little tool if used properly. As the saying goes, just because you can use it doesn’t mean you should. I think it’s perfect for videos or for showing off a couple of pictures, but it’s no way to showcase a gallery unless you have all the pictures interconnected through a link within the Lightbox. There’s nothing worse than having to click to see something, close the dialog box, and click again. That’s one of the first things that’s going to be gutted out of my portfolio for convenience’s sake.

One thing that didn’t occur to me on this video project was, oh hey, accessibility. I use alt text for the benefit of the impaired as well as search engines for images, but there’s so much more I need to learn in this particular area. I’ll let you know when we have some subtitle system figured out. One of my goals is to read Maximum Accessibility by John Slatin.

I’m trying to think up some clever new uses for it (because I’d love to use something nifty like this on my portfolio). It’s pretty simple to use as the developer lays out the code pretty plainly. A modification that goes beyond images can be found here.

Very cool. Just goes to show you that by fiddling with a some code, you can make some amazing things.