Jan Steinman wrote:
My convention for sites I do is to make links that go off-site open a new window.
I think that's a bad idea, personally. ;) Users really, really hate it when you force them to open links in a new window without expecting it.
I tried hacking around in include/Skin.php but was unable to add 'target="offsite"' to any of the code that builds '<a>' tags in a way that would reliably appear in generated pages.
Make sure you're not looking at previously cached HTML. (A simple way to be _really sure_ is to do the testing in an edit preview. The preview will _always_ be rendered fresh.)
Some browsers do not re-fetch data on the 'refresh' or 'reload' command if the server returns a 304 response. You may need to push additional buttons to force this (try control or shift). Additionally, if the parser cache is enabled (the default in 1.4) you may need to flush that; use action=purge, edit the page, or clear the objectcache table (if using the default cache backend rather than selecting memcached or turck mmcache data cache functions).
Specifically, I thought that adding the 'target' attribute would work inside getExternalLinkAttributes(), but refreshing a page with external links does not show the new target attribute.
Making this change does work in my testing, so check the caching issues above.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)