Thick Box, oh yeah!
Any one thats been around on the web for the last year or two has had to of noticed all the sites implementing the Lightbox technique all over the web. Lightbox allows you to create functionality to overlay images with some cool effects without the use of flash.
There are some others out there such as Greybox to overlay HTML content. Thickbox utilizes both Lightbox and Greybox functionality, but allows you to overlay all of the following extensions .jpg .jpeg .png .gif .html .htm .cfm .php .asp .aspx .jsp .jst .rb .txt.
Thickbox was created by Codey Lindley who is doing some great things with the JQuery Javascript library. If you check out the cool examples on Codey’s site you will see the powers of this effect.
I decided I wanted to try this since a recent project called for me to have a cool new type of popup for displaying an album cover which list the tracks and links to mp3’s. I know I may be a bit late on recommending this but I don’t really play around with these things until I have a need to do so on a project, its not like its rocket science and I’m missing something if I don’t. With all of these libraries out there its so much easier to find scripts to do the effects you want.
I highly recommend this and all of the other cool tricks you can do with the light weight JQuery Library. I had to be different then the norm and not use the script.aculo.us or Prototype libraries.