On Tue, Aug 08, 2006 at 10:44:25PM +0200, Steve Bennett wrote:
On 8/8/06, Simetrical Simetrical+wikitech@gmail.com wrote:
They aren't. You'd have to hack the software. This is a deliberate design decision, I believe: the user's browser gives them ways to decide where to open a link, and overriding them should be unnecessary. Let the user decide whether they want a new window or not.
Just because I'm controversial I'll disagree. Gmail, for example, always opens *every* external link in a new window. It works extremely well - you never have to worry about "losing your gmail window". It wouldn't be a bad thing if MediaWiki did similar - you're unlikely to really want to navigate away from Wikipedia, for instance, when you follow a link - most likely you'll read it then want to come back.
The user's browser can override any behaviour, but that's not to say that providing good default behaviour isn't necessary.
The user can *not*, in fact, override "open in a new window", and newer versions of FireFox (to my annoyance), don't even warn you.
That said, I'm all about configurability.
There's some javascript floating around that you can hang on the onblur ov a checkbox on your page that walks the DOM and toggles this flag on all A HREF links; that's my preferred approach.
Oh, <elitist>and anyone who "loses their gmail" window is <strike>too stupid to breathe</strike> in need of some basic training in how their tools work.</elitist>
Cheers, -- jra