Jude Robinson wrote:
Lachlan Hunt wrote:
There are no valid use-cases or reasons for opening a popup window
Well...there's *one*: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/open_new_windows.html
No, Jakob is wrong about that one. I know, it's strage, he's rarely
wrong about usability issues, but he is in this case.
Browsers and/PDF viewers can be configured in various ways:
* Open PDF within browser (the unfortunate default)
* Save PDF to disk, then open in external application (e.g. "PDF
Download", Firefox extension)
* Load PDF in external application (saving only to temp directory)
* User may not have a PDF plugin installed, and just be prompted to save it.
For anyone without the default setting, forcing a popup window would
result in new blank window. For those with the default setting, I'm
aware of the fact that this has been known to cause problems in older
versions (incl. crashing), but that is an issue for the browser/PDF
plugin vendors to address, not each individual site author.
The only information a browser needs is this in the HTTP headers:
Content-Type: application/pdf
It may help to include that in the type attribute.
<a href="foo.pdf" type="application/pdf">foo (PDF)</a>
But few browsers ever use that attribute by default. There may be
extensions that do (I don't know), but CSS can be used to style it or
JavaScript to do something else with the link to make it obvious to the
user that the link is to a PDF.
Theoretically, it's possible to interpret that type attribute to mean
open a new window, and it would seem trivial to write a Firefox
extension (or Greasemonkey script) to do that.
The important point is that telling the user/browser that the file is a
PDF should be all that is required for the user/browser to make an
informed decision about what to do with it.
--
Lachlan Hunt
http://lachy.id.au/
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