Ajax Fun - HTML preview popup window

[sizbut]

Still work in progress but well worth a look for those who want to add even more to their website.

Using some very simple javascript and css added to the zoom results template page, hovering over a result link shows a simple HTML preview of the page.

For me very nice as my site involves a large number of Help and Manual projects. When a page from one of those is loaded from a search result link, it runs javascript to then reload itself with the full navigation structure of the project of which it is a part. While not slow, the process is also not snappy.

The Ajax preview just shows the top portion of the page in question, helping people see if it really is the page they want. Throughly recommended, I just need to refresh my javascript to get it to just preview HTML page and not the PDF files.

[rschletty]

Sounds good! Are you saying it will preview PDF files? How about Word docs?

[sizbut]

No, just HTML or XML. It also treats the HTML as very simple text (can't handle graphics, does handle tables)

It will attempt to read some PDF's as plain text but showing people the header of a PDF file is pretty cryptic.

Hence I'm working on the javascript to only preview file links when the file has an HTML extension (ie. .htm/.html/.php).

Once I've conquered that I may add a different routine for handling file links that are graphics (ie. .png/.gig/.jpg) as my zoom search includes image file links in the results.

The basic script on which it is based is at http://www.javascriptworld.com/chap15/script04.html .