- From: fstorr <fffrancis@fstorr.demon.co.uk>
- Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2005 17:58:14 +0100
- Cc: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
> I believe it's up to the IT department of the company to setup the > machines how they should be setup. That's not to say that opening in a > new window is the right behavior (that's for usability studies to > determine). But given the difficulty in changing the default behavior, > it should be up to the more technical body to do so. > > Then OS and software manufacturers should fix their software. Hi Yep, we're in the usual "large corporate company with IT department and fairly hefty lockdown settings" set up. Normal, everyday users have very little control over what they can and can't do with regards to changing the behaviour of things like preferences for opening links, so it's down to us web developers to decide what to do with things like links. Personally I dislike links opening in new windows and we don't, on the whole, code them. The observation made by Patrick elsewhere in this thread that users normally close PDF/Office documents when they've finished with them and, because these currently open within a browser window, users shut the browser by mistake, is what we're currently up against. This is why we have the recommendation from the usability company to now open all of these documents in a new window, rather than maybe educating them to use the back button. I'm liking the Wikipedia approach of adding a CSS background image to a link - at least that way there's no extra image tag and alt text to contend. The downsie of this approach is that it leaves having to add in a title attribute or more inline text to notify the user of a new window. Regards F
Received on Thursday, 21 July 2005 16:58:28 UTC