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Posted by Andy Dingley on 02/21/07 12:34
On 20 Feb, 18:27, "idiotprogrammer" <idiotprogram...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi, my boss has told me I need to put "target_new" for all external
> hyperlinks.
So do it. It's their call, it's not the worst design crime in the
world. Just do it competently and with a clear conscience.
There's a question as to whether you _should_ do this. You'll never
find consensus, but "evil popups" are much further away from "new
sites in new windows" then those are from no new windows at all. Don't
blame an attempt to encourage site-stickiness for the past sins of the
ad poppers.
If you do do it, then you have several points to check and a couple of
decisions to make.
You cannot do it validly with a Strict doctype, so you either have to
move to a doctype declaration that's both HTML 4.01 Transitional and
still gives you standards-mode rendering (not all declarations for
this doctype do so)
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://
www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd" >
See also <http://hsivonen.iki.fi/doctype/>
This is only worth doing if your pages were valid Strict before and
valid Transitional afterwards. Otherwise stick with HTML 4.01 Strict.
Note that this isn't an excuse to drop back to using <font>! If they
were only valid as Transitional beforehand, then stay with Strict and
fix the markup before worrying about this. The web works (slightly)
better with minor invalidities than it works with valid obsolescences,
and it encourages progress.
Otherwise just accept the trivial invalidity this represents. You
might not want to do this if it's the difference between most pages
being perfectly valid and losing the useful ability to detect serious
invalidity for a page losing its clear valid status. It's CMS-
generated code, so you can usually control validity (and invalidities
from other sources) quite separately.
Stick a class="external-link" on your external <a>s too. You might use
it to control presentation, but it helps for content-management
anyway.
You can use a name instead of _new. If you have lots of links to "the
same" external resource, and if usability supports this, then you can
give that group of related links their same name so that they share
and recycle a single window. This can help to reduce vast numbers of
surplus windows opening, but it also has its own risk of being
confusing as old windows "vanish". Try it and see for yourself.
XHTML is an irrelevance to this issue.
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