[Mediawiki-l] Break out links-How are they done?

Hugh Prior mediawiki at localpin.com
Fri Aug 11 18:43:08 UTC 2006


David,

What you are looking to do is documented in:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Opening_external_links_in_a_new_window

As an experienced IT consultant, I am not at all in agreement with the 
statement that "break out links are bad Web design. Web site visitors are 
supposed to control that part of their own Web surfing experience, not Web 
site authors".  I think that sometimes it is very good web design.  Web 
design is exactly that - design - and the particular choice depends exactly 
on the web surfing experience which you wish to present to the visitors 
depending on the particular context.

I have conciously chosen, in my web site http://chainki.org to make external 
links open in a new window.  Why?  Because, I believe it is the most 
user-friendly thing for end users to be able to break out to sites they 
discover from Chainki, and to always find that the page that they have got 
the list of search results is there.

It is also a frequent argument against Frames, Flash and Ajax that each rob 
the web of the bookmarkable "page" concept (since you cannot bookmark a page 
which may have multiple versions.  Nonetheless, each has its own advantages, 
though Frames can and usually are replaced by non-Frame solutions which have 
all the advantages of Frames without any of the disadvantages.  The voices 
against Flash and Ajax are fewer since the advantages are so obviously 
apparent and huge.

As a reasonably regular reader of this forum the external links in a new 
window seems to me one of the most frequently demanded configurations.

I have also in this forum (search for posts by Hugh Prior) noted that it 
would be extremely easy to make under the control of configurabel variable 
in DefaultSettings.php:

/** Set to true to open external links in a new window
$wgOpenExternalLinkInNewWindow = false;

I hope that one day MediaWiki will relent from its overly motherly and 
dictatorial view on "good" web design and let web designers make such 
desicions themselves.


"David Spencer, MediaWiki User" 
<wikipedia.org at davidspencer.ca> wrote in message 
news:BAYC1-PASMTP07712B7A8C4EED7A5858ABD8540 at CEZ.ICE...
> August 8, 2006
>
> Hello:
>
> Break out links-How are they done?
>
>
> I would like to create an external link from my wiki to an external web
> site. I would like a new web browser to open up.






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