Re: Inline link icons

> 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