Inside Technique : Chromeless Windows for IE
By Gabriel Suchowolski (Edited by Scott Isaacs)

Creating Chromeless Windows is a trick originally demonstrated at WEBFx. We took this technique and created a reusable library for quickly creating and managing your windows. Before we walk through the library you really need to see a simple chromeless window demonstration. With chromeless windows you have complete control over the entire window. You can create custom title bars, status bars, scrollbars, etc. You are limited only by your imagination:

View the Demonstration

You can also find a more complete demonstration at my web-site, www.microbians.com, where we use this library to create the entire web-site's experience.

THE WINDOW WITHOUT CHROME

To simplify window management, we created a very simple library with a single function for opening the chromeless window - openchromeless(). This function is similar to the standard window.open method that it opens windows without the standard chrome.

openchromeless(
  theURL, 
  wname, 
  W, 
  H, 
  windowCERRARa, 
  windowCERRARd, 
  windowCERRARo, 
  windowTIT, 
  windowBORDERCOLOR, 
  windowBORDERCOLORsel, 
  windowTITBGCOLOR, 
  windowTITBGCOLORsel) 

This function exists in pz_chromeless.js. Simply including this library and calling this function creates your chromeless window. In our demonstration, we opened the window as follows:

function openIT() {
  theurl="test.asp"
  wname ="CHROMELESSWIN"
  W=785;
  H=270;
  windowCERRARa 	= "img/close_a.gif"
  windowCERRARd 	= "img/close_d.gif"
  windowCERRARo 	= "img/close_o.gif"
  windowTIT 	    	= " � window title"
  windowBORDERCOLOR   	= "#000000"
  windowBORDERCOLORsel	= "#FFFFFF"
  windowTITBGCOLOR    	= "#e0e0e0"
  windowTITBGCOLORsel 	= "#a0a0a0"
  openchromeless(theurl, wname, W, H, windowCERRARa, windowCERRARd, windowCERRARo, 
     windowTIT, windowBORDERCOLOR, windowBORDERCOLORsel, windowTITBGCOLOR, windowTITBGCOLORsel)
}

Next we explain how the chromeless function works for creating and dragging the window.

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