User blog comment:Kirkburn/Technical Update: October 1, 2013/@comment-452-20131003025422


 * "Tables wider than the available content space will now allow horizontal scrolling in-place"

Please define "allow"?

Horizontal scrolling appears to be "forced", rather than "allowed", as the "popout" class is no longer being respected.

My feedback:
 * The usage of the word "allow" when describing a forced change is deceptive.
 * Allowing something is great. Forcing something is not.
 * Taking away the ability to add the "popout" class to any table is bad.
 * It would be great if a vertical scroller was allowed, as I'm currently using a div trick to allow scrolling down a table rather than scrolling the entire page.

Disabling the ability to lightbox altogether is a bad move, because there are times a lightbox works better, such as when you want all the information on the screen at the same time. Or for cases where the table is within the page width, but the "popout" class has been added so that cramped information has more room.

I can't actually think of a single table were I would use horizontal scrolling instead of a lightbox - if I had any use for a horizontally scrolling table, I would have used the same a div trick to do that.

While I have no use for the horizontal scroller myself, I respect that others might, and think horizontal scrolling sounds like a great optional feature, but I don't agree with taking away the ability to show a tables in lightboxes.

edit: I can't think of any reason why not to "allow" both at the same time.
 * When a table is wider than the page width, show the table with a scrollbar for people who want to scroll, but continue to show the popout icon, in case people want to see all the content on screen at once.
 * When a table has the popout class manually added, show the popout icon at all times, as usual, and only show the scrollbar if the page is wider than the content area.