Posted by Rob McAninch on 01/09/06 06:24

Jose <teacherjh@aol.nojunk.com> wrote in
<news:_ygwf.1496$Bs4.1261@newssvr31.news.prodigy.com> :

> I agree they should be identified as PDF. Beyond that...

Consider this article:
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/open_new_windows.html

> They should...
> 1: not use any tricks at all? [...] which will probably open
> it in the same window, which is probably an unpleasant
> surprise.

As Yukka said in <Xns97458D39ECA09jkorpelacstutfi@193.229.4.246>
in reference to opening a PDF link in a new window:
"It does not solve the problem that everyone needs to meet a PDF
document on the Web for the first time in his life and learn
what to do with PDF documents."

Which has made me rethink my initial reaction to the Alertbox
mentioned above.

Even if you decided for usability reasons to open a PDF in a new
window, other websites may still use the standard content-type
headers from the server and normal links. Which means _your_ site
is now different. And it is commonly understood that visitors to
your site spend more time on other sites, thus it is often
necessary to use bad-design when that bad-design is familiar to
the user. See:
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20040913.html
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/991114.html

So the unpleasant surprise will likely only happen once or twice
before the user assimilates how to deal with a PDF (even if they
are annoyed and don't take action to make the browser act more to
their liking). And the unpleasant surprise will probably happen
on someone else's site:-)

> 2: use the target="_blank" attribute [...] Users can still
> trick click if they want to download (though I don't think
> many browsers let you trick click into an existing window)

With Firefox I can drag a link into an existing tab and have it
opened there, if that's what you mean.

> 3: use some other trick?

In light of the discussion thus far, I would say identifying them
as a PDF file is critical. And possibly a suggestion to open the
file in a new window is best. E.g.

Here's a document [PDF] (open document in new window).

Where the 2nd document has the target attribute. Or use a more
verbose statement at the beginning of a list of PDF links. I
suppose if you use a lot of PDF files it would be worthwhile to
offer some information about how to handle them.

--
Rob McAninch
http://rock13.com

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