As a fairly new e-commerce developer, I wanted to ask about a fairly common site requirement -- product previews. I've received inquiries about building a product preview dialog that allows customers to "build" a product. The specific items in question are ladies' handbags. The store owner has a fised number of patterns, but literally hundreds of fabric choices (~260 at last count). The desire is for a dialog that will allow users to select their fabrics of choice and see a real-time depiction of how their handbag might look.
Easily solved using a javascript mouseovers, but that would require hundreds of photos (each handbag uses two fabrics and in some cases three fabrics, so the number of possible permutations would prevent either her sewing up samples or the taking of a vast library of images). I suppose flash can do it without the large image requirements? But I was thinking about being a bit more sneaky -- how about a div with a background image set to the fabric of interest. Overlaid on top of said div is a png with the appropriate regions of the handbag transparent, allowing the fabric pattern to show through. Might be really tricky to implement for adjacent regions of the handbag, I suppose. And utterly unusable in IE 5.5 and 6, so not really all that practical an approach, I suppose, even with pngfix.
Any suggestions on how to approach this issue?
