Re: Re: Re: Re: Newbie - Rails 3 lightbox?

Walter Lee Davis
Thu, 11 Nov 2010 17:13:05 -0000

On Nov 11, 2010, at 10:59 AM, Marnen Laibow-Koser wrote:

>> I''m also thinking about the img:src to encode geometry for
>> Flash and other plugin content.
>
> That sounds smelly to me.  Of course, there''s img:height and
:width...
>
>> I haven''t added support for non-image
>> media types yet, though.

img:height and width only relate to the thumbnail itself, and the
whole point of a Lightbox is that you go from a little thumbnail to a
massive original, scaled to fill the screen if possible. This is
trivial in a static photo setting, because with careful application of
CSS dimension inheritance rules, you can get this more or less for free.

But you have to tell your Flash or QuickTime object/embed code what
dimensions the movie is -- BEFORE you load the movie. There are ways
to (sometimes) ask the movie after it''s loaded what its dimensions
are, but until you get the movie in place, you can''t do that, so
it''s
a chicken-or-egg problem, particularly vexing for very large files.

So if you can make your thumbnail image or link "aware" of the final
SWF dimensions -- remember, that''s probably not the same size (and
maybe not even the same aspect ration) as the thumbnail -- and use
that as a hint to your object/embed code that you are assembling on
the fly in response to that click, then your lightbox will know what
size to make itself etc.

Walter