David,
What you are looking to do is documented in:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Opening_external_links_in_a_new_window
As an experienced IT consultant, I am not at all in agreement with the
statement that "break out links are bad Web design. Web site visitors are
supposed to control that part of their own Web surfing experience, not Web
site authors". I think that sometimes it is very good web design. Web
design is exactly that - design - and the particular choice depends exactly
on the web surfing experience which you wish to present to the visitors
depending on the particular context.
I have conciously chosen, in my web site
http://chainki.org to make external
links open in a new window. Why? Because, I believe it is the most
user-friendly thing for end users to be able to break out to sites they
discover from Chainki, and to always find that the page that they have got
the list of search results is there.
It is also a frequent argument against Frames, Flash and Ajax that each rob
the web of the bookmarkable "page" concept (since you cannot bookmark a page
which may have multiple versions. Nonetheless, each has its own advantages,
though Frames can and usually are replaced by non-Frame solutions which have
all the advantages of Frames without any of the disadvantages. The voices
against Flash and Ajax are fewer since the advantages are so obviously
apparent and huge.
As a reasonably regular reader of this forum the external links in a new
window seems to me one of the most frequently demanded configurations.
I have also in this forum (search for posts by Hugh Prior) noted that it
would be extremely easy to make under the control of configurabel variable
in DefaultSettings.php:
/** Set to true to open external links in a new window
$wgOpenExternalLinkInNewWindow = false;
I hope that one day MediaWiki will relent from its overly motherly and
dictatorial view on "good" web design and let web designers make such
desicions themselves.
"David Spencer, MediaWiki User"
<wikipedia.org(a)davidspencer.ca> wrote in message
news:BAYC1-PASMTP07712B7A8C4EED7A5858ABD8540@CEZ.ICE...
August 8, 2006
Hello:
Break out links-How are they done?
I would like to create an external link from my wiki to an external web
site. I would like a new web browser to open up.