Being able to present online exhibit content has become more mainstream in recent months and I have received a number of requests for assistance. Over the last 15-20 years I have worked with and implemented a number of these solutions. There exists a large number of potential exhibit presentation solutions ranging from simple to complex, coding experience may or may not be required. In my opinion, the following represent the ideal philatelic exhibit solution attributes;

1. Responsive design – the exhibit page should be presented at full screen size no matter what the user device or display size. The user should be able to scroll around the page with ease and the user sh9ould be bale to zoom in to see details.

2. Finger friendly – Touch screens support for navigating between pages and frames including ‘swipe’ capability.

3. Simple, easy to implement - Solution should require no special software installation (on either the development computer or the user’s computer) or plugins. A small amount of html experience is likely to be required but solution should not require expensive coding knowledge.

4. Cross Platform – Solution should work seamlessly on operating system and in any browser

5. HTML5 compliant – Solution should be support currently HTML5 specifications, ideally should also be backward compatible as much as possible for older devices and browsers.

6. Versatile - Accept any sized ‘source’ exhibit images

7. Avoid requiring exhibit to be submitted in PDF format – Existing PDF exhibits can easily be converted to images but scanning an exhibit page, saving as an image, making a PDF from the images, and then converting back to an image is time consuming and often can negatively impact the image quality. Image based philatelic exhibits are a better solution than those based upon PDF files for a number of reasons.

8. Free, open source – Solution should be low or no cost

The current state of online philatelic exhibits is best described as a hodgepodge of development and implementation solutions. Ideally our hobby would standardized on a single solution so that exhibitors could be able to submit their work to any show or website without investing addition time and effort. The solution presented below not only meets the criteria listed but offers, in my opinion, a very good exhibit development standard for our hobby.

Below you will find demonstrations and source code for downloading and implementing this free solution. Simply uncompress the .ZIP file, each self-contained demo will be placed in their own folder. A JavaScript folder will be added which contains much of the ‘magic’ and is based upon open source ‘FancyBox’**. Experienced software coders can customized these files in a text editor like Notepad if desired but note this is not required, many hobbyists will never have to touch them. The demonstration folders also contain some sample images and a single, simple HTML file.

The single HTML file can be opened in any browser to see it in action. But this is also the file that an exhibitor developer will want to become familiar with since this is the file that would be customized with your own exhibit content. To modify this file, open it in a web developer application or a simple text editor. The demo pages are intentionally kept very basic and simple to facilitate learning and modifications. Note that each html file contains a few lines of code in the headers which calls the JavaScript files, these paths are important and the page will not work if the browser cannot find them. In the body of the html page, the links can be changed to match your image files names. Your image files should be located in the same folder; you can change the location but only if you also change the path to the image files.

** Fancybox is licensed under the GPLv3 license for all open source applications. For personal use, it is free. For commercial usage a license is required but is quite low cost; for more information see http://fancyapps.com/fancybox/3/