Mads Kristensen

My personal blog about everything tech

As you may have noticed, discussions about Web 2.0 have been going on here and at The Dojo for the last couple of weeks. It seems to me that developers take one stand and designers/marketeers another. Today I read the latest issue of Dr. Dobb’s Journal and Michael Swaine's column “Swaine's flames”. This man is very funny and very intelligent and here is a quote from his column.

“Uhh, does Tim Berners-Lee get a say in when the Web gets revved? Or is it the rule that anybody named Tim gets to start his own Web? Internet2, IPv6, those terms actually refer to something. But Web 2.0: What’s that exactly? Nobody seems to know. Last September Tim O’Reilly, who, along with his coconspirators at O’Reilly & Associates, coined the term, tried to explain what Web 2.0 was and/or wasn't. That essay convincingly demonstrated that Tim doesn’t know either. If Tim (either of them) can’t define it, I certainly shouldn’t try, but I will anyway: Web 2.0 is a commemorative coin minted in celebration of the end of the dot-com crash. Like all commemorative coins, it has no actual value.”

This illustrates the very point being made on this blog for the last weeks. Web 2.0 is hyped and, as Mr. Swaine points out, has no actual value. It has no value because it is a set of ideas that aren't new or special in any way. It takes credit for the evolution the internet/browsers/broadband has undergone the last years. Developers recognized that early on, but it is relatively new to almost everybody else.

If you often use shortcut keys to navigate the web or any other program for that matter, you probably expect the ESC key to close popups and message boxes (alerts). When using popup windows on the web, this is however not the case. If you use popups to show full sized images of thumbnails, it would be natural to press the ESC key in the expectation of the popup to close.

To achieve this functionality, we have to place a little JavaScript in the popup window. Add the following to the head section of the html page:

<script type="text/javascript">
 function ESCclose(evt) {
  if (evt.keyCode == 27) 
   window.close();
 }
</script>

Then add an onkeypress attribute in the body tag, like this:

<body onkeypress="ESCclose(event)">

That's all it takes and it's cross-browser compatible.