target="new" does not enhance usability.
Thread Starter
Jeff
(@jeff16)
If you don’t think so, that is your opinion, and thats fair. However, it is still a feature request that is the topic of my post, and I think is a good suggestion, it is not what I think or you think it should be used for and how it should be used. I also believe there must be other uses for being able to enter link attributes that would be useful to either yourself or to other people.
Forcing people to open links in new windows is a bit archaic these days. Especially in these days of tabbed browsers, where we’re all pretty used to ‘secondary click, open in…’ Not to mention if you use target=new, it doesn’t always open in a new TAB, and that can annoy people.
It’s also notably detrimental to anyone who’s disabled visually. My grandmother calls me bitching every time a site opens in a new window.
Think LONG AND HARD about why you’re doing this. If it’s so people don’t leave your site, darlin, that ain’t helping.
As for no-follow, why would you link to something in your header and NOT want to give it ‘link juice’?
Thread Starter
Jeff
(@jeff16)
Hi, thank you for a thoughtful reply. There are a few things, such as my “about” page, it is not beneficial for me to have the search engines index them. Secondly, I have pages that link to tools externally that are not really meant to be indexed. I could recode them possibly within wordpress but then its also dealing with javascripts and I have found wordpress to be pretty wonky with javascript or php or anything coded in pages or posts.
Incidentally, if new windows were a really bad idea, then wordpress.org needs to change their plugin site as every time you want to go to the developers webpage from the plugin download page it opens a new window. Either that was done for a good reason or it will be annoying to wordpress users. I personally understand it and think its a good idea to allow new windows because I might not actually want to leave the page.
If you don’t want a page indexed by search engines, there are better ways to go about that. Like a robots.txt file 🙂
wordpress.org needs to change their plugin site as every time you want to go to the developers webpage from the plugin download page it opens a new window.
This doesn’t happen to me on the wordpress.org/extend/plugins pages.
also, target as a link attribute doesn’t validate with xhtml strict (If im not mistaken)… so building it into WP could be an issue
I could see having article feeds (rss,xml…etc) which contain links within the body being rewritten to open blank or new targets. My search for such a plugin is actually why I landed here this morning. While links that I publish are fine as a self target, I’d prefer not to have fed links move viewers off-site. JMHO
