Standardizing on links that open a new window vs. in the same window on Dion Almaer's Blog

Jul 08

Standardizing on links that open a new window vs. in the same window

I don’t know about you, but I have gotten into the mode of “open in new tab” or “open in new window” for some links that I come across.

One of the annoyances is that you don’t often know if a link is target="elsewhere" or javascript:doSomethingWickedAndOpenANewWindow().

So, I wish there was a way to mark the difference. We could have a new pseudo part to CSS. We can now do a:hover, what about a:newwindow.

For now we can manually do stuff with class=”", but it would be nice to push out a standard so people start following it.

We could do the same with internal vs. external links (people often have a little icon for external links)