Re: New window inform user, before or after link?

Oh, It gets more complex than that.  This implies that old is bad and though
that may be a way to think, it is not necessarily true.  It is also true
that there are windowless environments out there but people who use them
know that they are using them so the fact that a link presents its self as
opening in a new window would be known as a nonsequetor in that environment.
The benefit you achieve is that it does not actual harm to let people know.
Yes, it can be redundant in the best of environments, but it does harm to
some if the fact is not disclosed in advance.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "David Dorward" <david@us-lot.org>
To: "W3c_Access" <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Sent: Thursday, March 04, 2004 10:25 AM
Subject: Re: New window inform user, before or after link?



On 4 Mar 2004, at 15:17, David Poehlman wrote:
> I agree that there is code to inform the user if implemented by the
> environment but many environments still do not inform.  The reason the
> author has to do it is because it is an authoring decision to code in
> this
> way and therefore, the responsibility of the author till corrected in
> the
> user world to do it.

A possibly simplistic view of the matter:

Good software warns users if it is going to open a new window.
Bad software doesn't.

If the author does not provide a warning, then users of bad software
suffer.
If the author provides a warning, then users of good software suffer.

Thus author provided warnings encourage users to choose bad software
(or to use good software but disable that good feature). This increases
the number of users using bad software and the demand for authors to
continue to punish users of good software.

What's more - say a user is using a windowless browsing environment
(such as lynx). Any such warning would be untrue as javascript and
target attributes can't make new windows open.

--
David Dorward
http://dorward.me.uk/

Received on Thursday, 4 March 2004 10:38:43 UTC