Forum Moderators: phranque
Can you tell me if you set your hyperlinks to OPEN A NEW PAGE or to open it in the same window? And when you answer, can you give me, in one sentence, WHY you choose what you choose?
If there seems to be a large answer in favor of one opinion, and the reasons sound good, I'll go with that one on my own site. Thanks for all your opinions.
Next up, people with visual impairments using screenreaders - the screenreader usually announces a list of links on the page, and those which open in a new window are announced - but it is easy to miss with the wealth of other information read out, and you break the "Back" function as much as for sighted viewers (the person has to call up a list of open windows, try to identify the original one from it's oftern obtuse title, then navigate to it).
Third reason is that I absolutely hate it when sites do this to me. I never open new windows, because I use a browser with tabs. You break my way of working. Of course, if I (or anyone else) wants to open pages in new tabs or windows, I can choose to do so easily.
Of course, no major site opens links in a new window ever, and if your site does, it is enough reason for me to leave and go somewhere else.
Wow, those are some excellent points. I can honestly say I NEVER thought of all those things you mentioned. They are serious issues to consider, alright.
Is this bad or so?
For my sites I only open a new window when it's an external site.
I gave way too much thought to this issue designing a real estate site since the standard practice was putting up the larger sized pictures in popups. Thing was, customer was real tiny, and at times would have very few properties, and very few pages. So I made 'mini pages' out of these popups (not javascript popups actually, just new pages that get resized to a smaller size) so I could put a couple of links on them w/ the cms if we needed the extra alt tags. Not ideal, really, but works.
For my sites I only open a new window when it's an external site.
That's pretty much standard.
Altough it's standard practice, that doesn't make it right. I completely agree with enclyo on the usabillity issues this presents. A site I inherited did use a new browser window for external links and I've been working to remove these types of links from it.
The back button is the single most useful button on the whole WWW (Yes, even more useful than the "Google Search" button). Links that open up in other browsers break the back button. This is annoying for experienced web users and the equivalent of giving a tourist bad directions for novice web users. They will eventually figure it out, but will most likely have a bad experience along the way.
