phil ringnalda

This once, and to a tiny extent, I disagree with Mark’s accessibility tip. Though for the most part it’s true that you shouldn’t open links in a new window with target=”_blank”, there is one time when you should: if you have opened a popup window with an accessible javascript link, then not opening links in new windows is hellish for accessibility, since otherwise your readers have to predict that you aren’t opening links in a new window, and know how to do it themselves, in order to avoid having something open in that little non-resizable window with no back button. I just had to fix my comments, since somehow they lost their <base target=”_blank” /> and I ended up with a fullsize page stuck into a popup.

Speaking of javascript, popups, and targets: there are those who think this is debatable, but I will SHOUT THEM DOWN: if you open a popup with a form in it (like, say, a comment), do not under any circumstances use anything but “_blank” for the target window name in the window.open javascript command. I can’t count the number of times that I’ve been typing a comment, needed to refer to something in another comment thread, either on that blog or another that used the same comment system (and thus the same window name), and clobbered my partially done comment by having the second comment open over it in the first popup window. If you open popups in “_blank”, then people have to close the popup when they are done with it. No big deal, they have to eventually anyway. If you reuse the same window, then you will have people lose partially done comments, and I know in my case I almost never start over when I lose one. In fact, I don’t see any benefit to the named window at all, given that for me at least, using IE6, if I open a comment in ‘comment’ and then go back to the main page and click another comment link, it just softly and silently opens in the old popup window without getting the focus, so that as far as I can tell, nothing happened when I clicked the link. How helpful is that?