Help with Javascript

[Rubu]

Probably arnab can answer this, but its open for any one

I'm having hard time with something that is supposed to be easy.

I've a table. the content of each cell are unequal and when showing all, it does not look good. so, what i'm trying to do is, show only the first 30 letters and when click on these 30 letters a pop up window will show up and show the whole string. here is the javascript function i'm using:

function showAll(message){

var newWin = window.open ("../showmessage.jsp");
var fi = newWin.document.getElementById("shwmsg");
fi.value = message;
}

this is not working. don't know why. any suggestions about how i can do this: create a popup window, pass a variable to it, show the value of the variable to the popup window.