Ajax patterns book. Design popups responsibly!

Sometimes I like to read books aloud. Keeps my pronunciation in shape, helps learning some quirks as well. It rarely happens when I read technical literature, however. Especially the one on programming. Well, here is a happy exception right there!

I was actually looking for a particular way to display dialog box on the Internet, when stumbled about this book: Ajax Design Patterns by Michael Mahemoff, published by O'Reilly in 2006. Unlike many other books featuring fancy "design patterns" this one really describes them in the original "Gang of Four" manner. Just funnier:

Frank is monitoring the factory equipment online and notices the T1000 machine is acting a little funny. He clicks on the icon, holds the mouse button down for a second, and up pops an information sheet about the T1000 model. The sheet is partially transparent and overlayed on top of a region of the plant diagram.

BTW that example I was looking for. Here is a small illustration on what dialog windows supposed to be used for according to the book. Surprisingly it is actually how I'd like to see dialog windows in real life as well:



And I decided to add some original content for my blog - the popup as most developers apparently see it. Not only they see it, they implement it this way.