The beauty of javascript pop overs
Sometime last year, I was looking into some of those JavaScript based “popups” that people had on their sites.
You know the ones, you put your mouse over the links and you see this expanded popup like area, hovering atop the text on the page.
Yet, unlike a popup, it does not create a new window. No, it just uses a technique involving a hidden DIV tag on the page.
Well, during my web hunt for something that did something along those lines, I came across what I consider one of the best free to use implementations out there. It’s called overLIB, and was written by Eric Bosrup. It’s very nice.
To see an example of its’ usefulness, you can have a look at this blog post by Clarke Scott. That’s just one example
Well, earlier today I was browsing around looking at a few examples, and came across an interesting article demonstrating the usage of an overLIB wrapper, for ASP.NET.
Looks very useful 
You could potentially combine the usage of that, with some of that XMLHttpRequest (aka AJAX — seems to be the current latest craze hitting the web) stuff to generate MSN Messenger style user popup alerts.
Though, one thing to remember is that the alerts will be contained solely within the web browser.
There is a whole heap of things you can do with it if you really wanted to.
Your imagination is powerful stuff in this industry, and never forget that. Though, there are times when it is not feasible to over utilise it
Specifications and all that jazz, is still important. But you know, if you have the time, personal projects are where you can really flex that creativity
Or of course, if you’re at Google, there’s always that 20% creative freedom time 