Introduction

The internet is popular for its presentation of different kinds of media. The users can watch movies, listen to music or simply view pictures on websites. There is a variety of different scenarios on how the user interacts with the media presented on a single webpage.
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Situation

To provide the enduser with some information about the item he/she is interacting with right now, the author of the webpage is adding additional information next to the media object. This includes name, format, sometimes size, download options, copyright info, etc. In more detail it could also be EXIF or IPTC information on photo objects or frames per second on movies or simply additional information/licence about the use of this object. To provide the visitors of a given site with these informations the original author has to integrate it into the site design and implement them manually into the website content. The manual placement of related information increases the risk of misspelling or the display of information the visitor is not seeking for. One solution to both problems would be that these information are retrieved and listed automatically and that the visitor can decide on his own which meta information he/she would like to look at.
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Solution

By looking at Apples Dashboard technology it becomes obvious that there are similiar problems for every dashboard widget. Each widget has some sort of meta information (copyright, author, company,…) and even preferences to display. Apple solves the issue by simply flipping the widget on its back so the user looks visually on the backside of the object to retrieve/set the necessary informations.
I would like to suggest to use the exact same mechanism on every media object in the Apple Safari browser. If somebody would like to gather more information about a photo on a website, he/she could simply flip the image and see the EXIF Informations or the size or the copyright and maybe a license on how this image is allowed to be used on its back. This little refinement would put the information directly in the right context and allows the user to decide when to see what where.
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