Architectural decisions about popups in web (.NET Vision)

I've always wanted to know what is, in a general way, the opinions about popups in web (I 开发者_如何学JAVAmean, those who are implemented via divs).

I've always liked not to load the user with the entire size of this popup in his navegation (when the popup is not visible). I assume that it's better load the content by demand (when the user clicks in the corresponding button). If you have five popups in one page, I always thought that the increase in 'bytes' can make a difference downloading the page.

Following the 'on demand' option I've always liked iframes because they let me change his URL via Javascript. So, I display a popup (div) which contains an iframe in wich I can change his contents downloading the page in this moment.

In my probably limited view, this method has another advantage. The validation logic (usually Asp.NET validators) are isolated in the popup page, so they don't enter in any kind of conflict with the validators located in the parent page (if applicable).

But it seems that iframes are not so well supported by some browsers and they are not too much appreciated by the community of designers (and it's a object with strong security implications).

So Basically I was wondering what are your experiences displaying these kind of UI. I know Jquery can load dynamically HTML in one div, but probably without isolating client validation scripting.

Opinions? THANKS a lot!

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Firstly, you can create validation groups (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms227424.aspx). That will help you with your validation problems.

You're right, you can use jQuery to dynamically load HTML as appropriate, but I'm not sure how well that works with aspx pages. There are problem a number of gotchas. Consider, you have page1.aspx and popup.aspx. If you load popup.aspx in an iFrame, you're fine, because it's a separate page. If you load it dynamically via JQuery.load() - the output of popup.aspx will load into your page1.aspx (this includes html tags, form tags, viewstate fields etc). That will likely cause some problems. (I haven't tried just guessing).

I have used .load in the past, but I tend to load standard html pages, not aspx pages. Then when the "submit" button is pressed, it calls a webservice with the relevent fields. This adds more javascript coding on my part - coding the "submit" button, coding a webservice to handle the ajax submit, coding the "wait screen" while an action is being done or data being submitted via ajax. I also have write the js to do client side validation and any code to handle server side validation and report that back to the user.

jQuery Validation plugins work well for this - or alternatively, you can instantiate .net validators if you don't want more plugins / frameworks (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/yb52a4x0.aspx)