Webmasters Gallery

There are many fantastic JavaScript/AJAX solutions out there to view a larger version of an image by displaying it as a in-page pop-up or lightbox pop-up. It is rare to visit a website with a photo gallery that does not already utilize one of these solutions.

So why not make it a standard? Why not let the browsers take care of the heavy lifting rather than us web developers via JavaScript? Drew Wilson proposed adding a fullsize attribute to the <IMG> tag. By which you can references a larger (or fullsize) version of the SRC image. Browsers could then include native support to display the fullsize image in a pop-up. You can vote for Fullsize and add your name to the list of those who support this Fullsize idea.

Even though Fullsize is not currently in the next HTML spec yet, you can still get Fullsize jQuery plugin now. Since there is no fullsize attribute for the <IMG> tag yet, he is using the longdesc attribute instead. longdesc is a completely valid image attribute and is meant to contain a URL to a description of the image. The Fullsize jQuery plug-in is super easy to use, and provides a kick start to standardizing the way image pop-ups look and work.