[Moin-user] Re: open target in another window? (skip at pobox.com)

[Robert Seeger]

> From: skip at pobox.com
> Subject: [Moin-user] open target in another window?
>
>
> In HTML I can create a link that opens in another window by
> using a target
> attribute in the <a> tag:
>
>     <a
> href="http://www.914club.com/bbs2/index.php?act=ST&f=2&t=41949
> " target="_blank">3.3 Turbo update</a>
>
> Is there a way to do that with MoinMoin's link syntax?  I didn't see
> anything obvious in the HelpOnLinking page.  We're still
> running 1.3.4 at
> work, though I could be convinced to upgrade if that solves
> the problem.
>
Actually, downgrading would be your solution ;-((
All that has been written on this topic so far is only partially true. This
Syntax existed in MoinMoin 1.1, was IMHO very straightforward and well
implemented.

It was later deprecated and removed for reasons that I personally have my
doubts about, see
http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/MoinMoinBugs/ExternalLinkWithNewPage. Now you
can't even find it on HelpOnLinking, so here are the missing examples from
1.1:
  * [^http://moin.sourceforge.net/ MoinMoin Sourceforge Homepage - in new
window]
  * [^wiki:MeatBall/InterWiki InterWiki page on MeatBall in new window?]

As I could not accept this for my existing 1.1 wiki farm (breaks a lot of
markup), it took me about 30 minutes last week to analyze and patch 1.3.5 to
silently ignore this kind of markup (which is the LEAST that a developer
should do if he decides to remove a feature anyway) and another 30 minutes
to re-implement it so that it worked for my test cases (which does not say
that I restored the function completely, I did not yet do really extensive
testing). To use a macro for this is very clumsy and does not work well in
every situation.

So I urge the core developers to reconsider the decision to remove such a
good feature - or at least do something not to break existing markup! Whats
so bad about emitting the extra attribute 'target="_blank"' in an <A>-tag?
Maybe some "modern" browsers won't understand it (hard to believe), but then
it should not do any harm.

Kind Regards,
Robert Seeger