by Bozho | Mar 3, 2019 | Aggregated, html, Opinions, web
The target="_blank" href attributes has been been the subject of many discussions. When is it right to use it, should we use it at all, is it actually deprecated, is it good user experience, does it break user expectations, etc. And I have a strange proposal for improving the standard behaviour in browsers – implicit target=_blank" in certain contexts. But let’s try to list when target="_blank" is a good idea: On pages with forms when the user may need additional information in order to fill the form but you don’t want them to leave the form and lose their input On homepage-like websites – e.g. twitter and facebook, where your behaviour is “browsing” and opening a link here and there. It may be applied to things like reddit or hacker news, though it’s currently not implemented that way there In comment/review sections where links are user-provided – this is similar to the previous one, as the default behaviour is browsing through multiple comments and possibly following some of them The typical argument here is that if a user wants to open a new page, they can do that with either the context manu or ctrl+click. Not many users know that feature, and even fewer are using it. And so many of these pages are confusing, and combined with a sometimes broken back-button it becomes a nightmare. In some of these cases javascript is used to make things better (and more complicated). In the case of forms, javascript is added to warn people against leaving the page with an unfinished form. Javascript is used to turn certain links to target=”_blank”...
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