Steve Bennett wrote:
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.
Yup. :-)
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...
Indeed.
It really is an imponderable. Mediawiki already treats external links significantly differently from internal ones, proving (even to the 80's-vintage troglodytes among us) that there *is* a difference. And if mediawiki were to start adding "target=new" to the list of other ways it distinguishes external links, that would be arguably perfectly appropriate in the context of today's Web. There would be some few who would spit nails and/or rage against the dying of the light, but they would be comparatively few (though *very* vocal :-) ).
I haven't looked at the code, but I would guess that making this a site-configurable option would be very easy, and I'd think it ought to be pretty noncontentious, too (at least until someone tried enabling it on the Wikimedia sites...)