On 8/11/06, Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com wrote:
One of the fundamental original principles of the web was that links were cheap and could take you anywhere. People understood
Yeah, back in 1984 or whatever. Things changed a lot. I notice that now we have very different styles of link behaviour, and what you expect from a link changes a lot. On a blog, I expect every second word to be randomly linked to some random site. On a corporate site, I expect 95%+ of links to be internal. It's gotten pretty much to the stage that unannounced external links are surprising to me.
this, and in fact they thought nothing of it, because what we now call "external links" were essentially the norm. The concept of an integrated web "site" that you either wandered around within, or made some kind of a conscious decision to "break out" of, hadn't been developed yet.
Websites were also small then. They didn't have a lot of content of their own. They certainly didn't have a behemoth the size of Wikipedia.
The related notions of
* I must control my user and not let him leave My Domain. * It is easy for someone new to computers to head to a. new link and forget what they originally were looking for. Then they leave our wiki. * When I send someone to an external link, I am not responsible for the content of that external site. Sometimes newbies may think that I created the external pages, too.are all comparatively recent, and although mechanisms like
I'm dying to see the word "newfangled" in this discussion somewhere...
(On the other hand, though, I have to confess that a well-chosen target=new can be really handy sometimes, when a page designer "got it right" in terms of using it just where I would have wanted a new window anyway...)
It may just be the way I browse the web, but I don't have any gripes. I tend to open *every* link in a new tab, so it doesn't make much difference whether they were planning for a new window or not.
Steve