On Fri, Aug 11, 2006 at 12:27:08PM -0400, Steve Summit wrote:
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.
Well, in the context of the current discussion, we were talking about visitors to some website running MediaWiki.
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.
Is that really true?
I've been using the web since, like, 1995 or so, and I don't recall that it was ever quite like that. Websites weren't quite as *big*, granted, but...
The related notions of
- I must control my user and not let him leave My Domain.
I hate these people.
- 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.
Yes, they do. If no one taught them about Back and History, tough.
And this one really only makes any sense in the context of the previous one anyway, which is crap.
- 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.
That one's a slightly bigger issue, but only slightly. I liken it to people having to understand how roads and signs work to be able to drive. Why we enable such people who proudly decline to learn how to use their tools completely eludes me.
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.)
And very nicely.
(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...)
Correct. Mostly, this is "Web apps" typs stuff.
Cheers, -- jra