You may notice that a number of pages use a system of loading larger images into a new frame if you click on the smaller thumbnail.
You may wonder why this is done and why it's done this way?
Thanks for asking! It gives me a chance to ramble on about web page design, the choices that must be made and the tradeoffs that I struggle with from time to time.
You have to start with the understanding that not everyone has the same bandwidth. The system I design these pages on is purposely on the weak side, to make sure I don't leave anyone in the dust.
If I had a real barn-burner of a system, and a high speed link, I might build something that really counted on bandwidth. An approach that might work just fine for your system might be molassas on someone elses. I try to bring everyone along.
Not that I don't wish for high speed data at times.. :-) but out here in the country that's not available yet.
One of the most difficult issues is based around the images. There are a lot of ways to make images load faster, from using a lower quality image to making them smaller. I tend to gravitate toward the smaller picture approach, since I hate grainy pictures.
Also, small is a relative thing. On some screens the pictures that look
tiny to you actually come out pretty large. Remember that browsers can be set up in a number of different ways, from fonts to overall window size, so the pages are designed to flow with those variations.
So you can see that I try to keep the images small. Yet some of them are important, whether because the details are very fine or because it's just a great picture. In those cases I try to have a larger image available, just a click away.
Both of these pictures, for instance, can be clicked on to load a larger image.
Now to the point: why do these new images come up in a different frame? That's
because when you load a new image and then go back, a large percentage
of the time you'll be forced to either completely reload the images or
the browser will at least check to see if they have changed. That can take quite a bit
of time. So I just load the new one into a new window, so you can flip back and forth without dramatic load times.
On some larger screens it also allows you to have both up at the same time. If only we all had such large screens..
Keith Peterson, Webmaster, Cardinal Flyers.