The one thing every web user understands is the “Back” button. It’s an integral part of browsing the web. Follow a link, go back. Explore a search engine result, go back. Even my father can do this, and he’s still excited when he can double-click the “Internet” icon successfully on the first try.
In all dominant browsers, using the <a target="_blank"> tag to force a link to open in a new window breaks the Back button. The new window does not retain the browser history of the previous window, so the “Back” button is disabled. This is incredibly confusing, even for me, and I’ve been using the web for 10 years. In 2002, it’s amazing that people still do this. Don’t do this. Don’t force links to open in new windows.
Later: please note that this tip is about you as a web designer, not you as a web user. If you want to open new windows while you browse, go right ahead. In Internet Explorer for Windows, hold down the Shift key while you click a link to open the link in a new window. In Netscape 6 and Mozilla, hold down Control. In Internet Explorer for Mac, hold down Command. (Some browsers such as Opera support advanced combinations like Control + Shift + click to open a link in a new window in the background.) The point is that the choice of whether a link will open in a new window should be the end user’s choice, not the web designer’s choice.
Jackie benefits. Although JAWS does announce “New browser window” when a link opens a new window, this is easy to miss, as it is spoken wedged between the reading of the link text and reading of the new page. Home Page Reader has a better solution; it plays a distinctive sound every time a new window opens. And Window Eyes, another popular screen reader, gives no indication of new windows at all.
And regardless, the “Back” button is still broken. If Jackie misses the “new browser window” announcement, she can not simply glance at her taskbar and see that two browser windows are open. She will need to read through her entire list of open windows, either using the JAWS-specific shortcut INSERT+F10 to get a window list, or the standard ALT+TAB.
Lillian benefits. Her Internet Explorer window is always maximized (so she can see it), and new windows also open maximized by default. Her taskbar is generally too small for her to make out individual buttons; furthermore, Windows XP groups multiple windows of the same application in the taskbar, so there is virtually no visible indication that a new window has even been opened. Suddenly, the “Back” button is disabled for no apparent reason, and Lillian has no idea why. If you were expecting her to read the rest of your weblog after following that link, you can forget it.
<a target="_blank"> to force links to open in a new window.target attribute of the <a> tag is deprecated, and will prevent your pages from validating in HTML 4.01 Strict, XHTML 1.0 Strict, or any future version.mailto: links open new windows. The consensus is that mailto: links are not an accessibility problem, even though they generally open your email client in a new window, because this behavior is completed determined on the client side. A web-based mail form (like Radio uses) may be a better overall solution, provided the form is accessible. A web-based form will work for visitors without integrated email clients (by misconfiguration or by circumstance, such as being in a public lab), and it protects your email address from spam harvesters without resorting to inaccessible Javascript tricks. On the other hand, some people really like their email clients due to familiarity, functionality (such as built-in spell checking), and the ability to archive outgoing messages. I am not recommending one method over another.§
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© 2001–9 Mark Pilgrim