in reply to Re: Deprecate target attribute in <a> tag
in thread Deprecate target attribute in <a> tag

It aint broken, so it should only be depreciated, not forbidden completely.

That's still more than you should expect: the Q tags were forbidden completely (in both the CB and posts) just because some browsers (IE) don't handle it correctly. That's a devil's loop: if people don't use the Q tag, then browsers will never support it. (Also, does anyone know if this can be fixed at least partially with a CSS declaration?)

  • Comment on Re^2: Deprecate target attribute in <a> tag

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Re^3: Deprecate target attribute in <a> tag
by Anonymous Monk on Sep 16, 2005 at 19:10 UTC
    This is clearly the devil's loop. If Perl monks don't produce target="_blank" links, then you and herveus will clearly never get off your duffs and fix your browsers to ignore target= (and perhaps browsers will never support such a configuration) and all of the other sites on the internet will continue to annoy you two by violently forcing you to open a new window against your will.
[reply]
      Howdy!

      Pray, enlighten me then.

      I use FireFox these days. What magic incantation do I perform to make it ignore target?

      Frankly, most sites that I deal with *don't* use that "feature". In addition, I *do* often open links in new tabs. I'd be mostly mollified if I could tell Firefox that "target=_blank" should open a new tab.

      ...and, now that I've done a bit of research, I find that there *is* and extension for Firefox that probably will do what I want, and also that the Firefox team has considered the whole mess of just *how* target should work with tabs and all that. If I read it correctly, Firefox 1.5 may have improved control over this matter.

      Now, I'm not withdrawing my request to deprecate the use of the target attribute. I didn't say "ban it outright". I started with something less drastic. I'd like to see reasoned discussion of the benefits of "target" in the context of links on PM.

      yours,
      Michael
[reply]
        I use FireFox these days. What magic incantation do I perform to make it ignore target?

        First choice: Get the tabbrowser preferences extension.

        Second choice: Get the greasemonky extension and then find and install a script called killblank.user.js.

        Sorry, I don't have links handy right now.

        -sauoq
"My two cents aren't worth a dime.";
[reply]

      Well, there's some truth in that. I'm not sure. But if many people fix their browsers to ignore those attributes, than more sites may use javascript to open links in a new window (some sites do that now too), which is even worse than the current situation. Surely, you can block those pop-ups easily, but then the page doesn't get loaded anywhere, it's not just that it's loaded in the same window.

      (Also note that there's also a better reason of using the target attribute: loading pages to the correct frame on framed pages. It's only the case when it opens a new window that should be ignored.)

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