The reason is we go to a great deal of trouble to get users to come to our site and we don't want to send them away again. That's why I never allow a client to sign up for any of those awards sites or top 100 sites. A site gets higher ratings with search engines if there are a lot of other sites linking to you. To get those links you usually need reciprocal links, but that doesn't mean you want to send your users off to those sites just yet. That's the reason you need to have a way to open a link but still keep the users in the one place.
Another reason is if links go off to subsidiary information. You still want to keep the flow of the original article. For example, try reading the technical data relating to an update on the Microsoft site. You start out by reading that "this update requires the prior installation of update something else". To find out if you have that update you go off to that link, which in turn takes you on another link and then another and another, and before you know it you're off down the yellow brick road and have no idea how to get back to the original point. If any of the pages are dynamic you can't use the back button. As a general rule, any link that takes a user outside my site, I put it in a new window. If it takes them somewhere in this site, I don't. Cheers Mike Kear Windsor, NSW, Australia AFP Webworks http://afpwebworks.com -----Original Message----- From: James Ellis [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, 8 February 2004 10:46 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Opening pages in new windows... was Re: [WSG] XHTML (OT??) Hi This kind of thing should be left up to the end user. As an example have a look at the NASA sites at the moment -windows opening everywhere and even using javascript to replace a simple target=_blank (why??). Really annoying. Modern browsers have an open in new window and the good ones have open in new tab on the context menu. We should be letting the users (us as well as others) decide where they want to open a new page as it's their browsing environment. Many UA's can force all links to open in the same page, rendering any targeting useless. Denoting external links with icons can be a good thing if you want to show a user where they will go (although the status bar does that as well). If a user hits an external link on a page they can use the back button to head back, if you want to keep state then this can be done at the application level using sessions and whatnot. Cheers James ***************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ *****************************************************
