Changed subject to reflect this change in topic. Also cc'ing design
mailing list.
In terms of external links to me I don't care about whether I'm leaving the
site or not. If I clicked on something and it wasn't what I expected that's
a badly labeled link. A link saying there is more information on the [white
house official website] and a link to the word [house] should be enough
information to tell which I'd external and which isn't.
I actually think the only place an icon next to a link really makes sense
is for downloads. Clicking something that downloads a PDF when I thought it
was a web page is a little confusing (on mobile at least).
That said if all the external links are in the external links / references
section wouldn't encouraging that organisation of links be better....?
Also I agree with Juliusz that we shouldn't force behaviour of where links
open. It should be up to the user if they want the same tab or new one and
it should be configurable within the browser preferences.
On 24 Oct 2013 16:07, "Juliusz Gonera" <jgonera(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
No, we should definitely not warn people, that's
just weird ;) It's not
like something bad is about to happen.
I'm also not saying that users have the expectation that links point to
local URLs, I'm only saying that it might be a useful piece of information
to some.
On 10/24/2013 02:48 PM, Jared Zimmerman wrote:
Its definitely a less heavy handed way of doing the thing many
(annoying) sites do when they warn you that you're leaving their site. I
just wonder is the signal to noise it worth it. I don't know that modern
web users have any expectations that link within a site always point to
local site urls.
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*Jared Zimmerman * \\ Director of User Experience \\ Wikimedia
Foundation
M : +1 415 609 4043 | : @JaredZimmerman<https://twitter.com/JaredZimmerman>