Steve Bennett wrote:
On 8/11/06, Jay R. Ashworth jra@baylink.com wrote:
People have a tendency to try to make things easier for 'dummies' :-) while make much more important things much harder for 'smart people'.
In the context of Wikipedia, we don't so much have "dummies" as we have "passers-by". You can't train someone who is only willing to spend 5 minutes of their life on your site
That's true, but unless I missed something, in the case of "break-out links" we're not talking about visitors to Wikipedia; we're talking about users of the World-Wide Web.
One of the fundamental original principles of the web was that links were cheap and could take you anywhere. People understood 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.
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 target=_blank or target=new do address at least the second two, they can also be wildly annoying to people who do understand how the web works and do know how to use their Back button. (I know y'all know this; I'm just stating the obvious.)
(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...)