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

[Nir Soffer]

On 30 Nov, 2005, at 14:13, Robert Seeger wrote:

> 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.

This feature is not supported by HTML 4 strict. I think you can add 
support by using language extensions - but I'm not sure how its done.

> Now you
> can't even find it on HelpOnLinking,

Whats wrong with correct docs? :-)

> 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.

A macro is not clumsy and does work well for all situations - in this 
case, few links in a wiki.

Opening a new windows from a link is in most cases bad user interface. 
Users want to control their windows and tabs, and you should not try to 
do things behind their back. There are only few cases when it will help 
the user to open another page in another window, and even in those 
cases, some user might be annoyed by this, for example, they may want 
to open the link in a new tab, not in a new window.

Some related links:
  * http://diveintoaccessibility.org/day_16_not_opening_new_windows.html
  * http://www.useit.com/alertbox/990530.html

In those few cases when you really want to force the user to open a new 
window, you may use a macro.

> 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?

See above.

I think the removal of that feature was good decision, and there is no 
need to bring it back. However, when features like this are removed, 
they should be first depreciated and only then removed, and there 
should be a migration tool to remove such markup from exiting pages.


Best Regards,

Nir Soffer