On Fri, Aug 11, 2006 at 07:25:17PM +0200, 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. 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.
I think it's *specifically* corporate sites.
Some 'designer' told them that off-site linking would rape their small children, or something.
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...
Five miles. In the snow. Uphill. Both ways.
(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.
Certainly a matter of taste.
The reason this whole thread got started was because browsers don't have reasonable facilities for *overriding* Target=_new for those who prefer not to.
And don't get me started on people gratuitously locking window sizes, and turning off chrome and scroll bars.
On my 1400x1050 monitor.
With Ctrl-+ up 2 notches.
Cheers, -- jra