Andreas Boehmer [Addictive Media] wrote:
Funny that you mention the Mac behaviour. Mac does exactly what all of us are agreeing to be terrible behaviour of some websites: it constantly opens new windows all over the place. So how comes this behaviour is accepted by the Mac community who are known to openly support their interface, yet it is shunned in web development standards?
We-ell, Windows does it too, you know. And a Linux GUI is liable to open new windows as well, depending on your configuration.
But in those circumstances, it's a known behaviour pattern and you actively invite a new window as an informed user.
The issue on the web, IMHO, stems from the misuse of pop-ups for advertising and porn, especially the verdammt on_close spawuning of new windows. As an experiment once I ran through a cycle of popups to see how many I would get from one source. I stopped with 29 open windows due to resource constraints on the PC (it was only a pentium, after all).
So, in order to ensure users don't get snared in a mass spawning, collective wisdom has decreed that new windows are bad.
As with most things in life, I don't think it's that black and white. There are times when a new window might be useful. I, myself, have been known to right-click a new window into being when I want to keep something separate. The KEY thing here (and pardon me, Rick Faarberg, but I don't think you're getting it) is that it is MY choice to fire off a new window. It's not up to the developer's judgment - it's up to the USER's judgment.
Christian came up with a bunch of ways to achieve a business need without opening a new window - we need to think more creatively about the workflow we're creating so we don't put users in bad positions.
cheers Mark Harris ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************
