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

[Robert Seeger]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Nir Soffer [mailto:nirs at freeshell.org]
> Sent: Wednesday, November 30, 2005 1:46 PM
> To: Robert Seeger
> Cc: moin-user at lists.sourceforge.net
> Subject: Re: [Moin-user] Re: open target in another window?
> (skip at pobox.com)
> 
> 
> 
> 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.
> 

Sorry, I still don't see that in any W3C standard.
http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/present/frames.html#adef-target says:
"The target attribute may be set for elements that create links (A,
LINK), image maps (AREA), and forms (FORM)." Furthermore
http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/types.html#type-frame-target explicitly
defines "_blank" as a valid special name. 

But that's a rather academic discussion.
> > Now you
> > can't even find it on HelpOnLinking,
> 
> Whats wrong with correct docs? :-)
Nothing, I just wanted to say that if you don't know that such thing
existed in the first place, you can't find it.
> 
> 
> 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.

I have to admit that I am quite ignorant (or rather have to be,
according to company rules ;-) about all the fancy new Firefoxes, Operas
etc. but I don't think that "in a new tab" is a W3C HTML4 concept
either. How do you encode that into an A link tag?
We use a lot of interwiki links, both to interlink between all wiki
instances in our wiki farm and also to allow easy symbolic links to
other parts of our knowledge management (fileserver directories,
epydoc-server, roundup tracker issues, centralized mail adresses and
mails...). In all those cases users get quite confused if they get
transferred to a different location and still have the same window.
Sometimes they close the window accidentially and thus lose the wiki
user interface as well (happens even to me quite often ;-((  
Using a macro instead of a simple one-character markup does look neither
pythonic nor "wiki way" to me, but that's just my humble opinion. It's
hard enough to teach "good" link markup syntax to average users (meaning
"use interwiki monikers, don't post hard URLs"), but it's much harder to
teach them to write a macro call for each link.

So I respectfully disagree with Nir's opinion, but I was not the one who
asked first and   m y   problem is solved. MoinMoin coding is not pure
democratic anarchy and if the core developers make different decisions
that's their right - I don't have to live with those as long as I can
patch around them - hey, that's the fun in open source python projects
;-))

Kind Regards,
Robert