Re: Target, or opening a new instance of UA with a link

* Timothy J. Luoma (luomat@peak.org) wrote:

> I suspect that Thomas feels about 'target="_blank"' the way I felt the
> other day when someone told me they had found a valid use for <blink>

blink {
        text-decoration: none;
}

Easily fixed if you dislike it (and, indeed, if you love it you can do
body {text-decoration: blink;}).

> I love Opera's 'refuse popup windows' feature, esp. in that it will
> normally redirect to _self (auto JS popups don't happen at all, and
> document.open etc just don't react_.

Unfortunately, when a document uses document.open I would prefer for
it to work than do nothing.  I'd prefer being able to disable things
like on(click|load) so it falls back to the href (assuming it's not a
javascript: link, sigh), but at the end of the day, something that works
is better than something that doesn't.

However, these are client/UI issues, nothing to do with HTML.  Still, I
can see some application for CSS there, especially with per-site
namespaces in CSS 3 selectors.

> However, there are valid cases to use 'target="_blank"' and I can name at
> least 1.... when writing 'sidebars' for Netscape (what Opera calls
> 'Panels').

That's a specific problem in a specific domain, something HTML needs to
move *away* from solving so it can concentrate on being a decent
language for creating documents in.  Obviously, CSS needs to follow suit
to take over these issues.

> So I have two options:
> 1) leave it broken
> 2) leave it in XHTML1.0-trans.

3) Write to HTML 4.01 Strict, which is just as valid :)

> I do miss this and wish it wasn't removed.... Yes it can be overused
> and misused, but so can 'text-decoration: none;' and a thousand other
> things.  If we take out everything that can be abused, we'll be back
> to ASCII ....

It's not so much that it can be abused, but that it doesn't really mean
anything; sure, if you select a target="_blank" link in your browser it
opens a new window, but what about lynx, or an aural browser, or
whatever.  These domain specific issues are being pushed back into CSS.

The same can be said for frames, and although the standards and the
support for CSS alternatives are not yet something to write home about,
they do exist, and that's the important bit.  We still have the older
standards to work with until the newest ones become usable.

> and then someone will post in ALL CAPS reminding us we need to go around
> and remove the CAPS LOCK key which will help keep caps from being
> abused...

I've had caps lock rebound to escape for months.  Nice for vim.

> at the slight inconvenience to anyone who needs to use a lot of
> ABBRs ;-)

I would think that would be lost in the noise when you're using <abbr>
tags, which you should :)

> (Let's not even discuss needing to remove Outlook for encouraging top
> posting and not being able to quote properly, or removing > for people who
> don't know how to trim replies ;-)

Maybe we need another consortium to encourage the correct behavior ;)

-- 
Thomas 'Freaky' Hurst  -  freaky@aagh.net  -  http://www.aagh.net/
-
To find out a girl's faults, praise her to her girl friends.
		-- Benjamin Franklin

Received on Sunday, 3 March 2002 12:08:53 UTC