I asked if there was a way to do this before and was told I’d have to hack the source.  Now I am just asking for it as a new feature.

Add targets and a default target to the Link Button in the Publish Screen.  It already asks for title, so why not just add the ability to have it add Target=“whatever”?

Maybe add a default target to the config somewhere like General Configuration.

and make it optional, I don’t want to have to click even more times.

Right. Optional please!  Targets are bad bad bad and I certainly don’t want them on my website.  Targets are meant to be used in frames.  But I’ll try to stop preaching about it. 

/me agrees with Lynda.

/nod targets are bad. definitely optional. : )

ACK optional

ok, just slap me around..
Just a though, and targets are useful when not overdone.

I like targets even though I know they are not strict xhtml compliant. I only use them in links within posts.

I do not care if targets are xhtml compliant or not. I want an easy way for offsite links to open in a target=“_blank” window without a customer mangling the code manually but rather just saying “YES” to a new window question. And I do not want to hack the backend files because I want upgrades to be seamless.

Thanks pmachine.

My opinion and request:

1. Opinion. Targets, just like pretty much anything on the web, can be bad when used incorrectly or by someone who doens’t know what they are doing. It’s not a good or bad or right or wrong thing. It’s about usage, experience, and context. So long as the browsers support target=“_blank” we will continue to use it to link to external sites and resources. One of the primary goals of an Internet Strategy Consultant/Developer is to keep people on their client’s website. When on the first page, the web developer links to their own site in the footer, and it doesn’t target _blank, (or any other external link), that web developer has failed their client.

2. Request. I visited this forum tonight to request that the Textile plugin be updated with this very feature so that we can provide new windows to external links. Right now you can create a link using Textile with the format:

This is easy for non-techie people to use and understand and allows them to even provide the ‘title’ parameter to the anchor tag. Allowing something like the following:

That would also create a target=“_blank” parameter would also help. It doesn’t so much matter what the syntax is ( in case the [] are not able to be used for some reason), just so long as we can provide our clients with a simple cheat sheet on the correct and easily understandable way to create a link either to an internal or external page.

I thnk for this you’d want ot talk to textile’s creator - at www.textism.com.  But Dean is very into standards compliance and that’s part of textiles purpose - is to make it easy to remain compliance; so you probably won’t find this added in the general release. =)

dhman - how about implementing something like this:

Opening a link in a new window - the valid way

LisaJill: I thought about contacting Dean but am pretty sure the EE crew has modified the EE Textile plugin code. But you make a good case in terms of standards and due to that I’m modifying my request and will request the same from Dean over at Textism:

Based on this article I would like to request the EE Plugin be modified to include some facility by which one can specify an additional attribute for the <a> tag. In addition to the title attribute, it would be very helpful to be able to specifiy a value for the rel attribute as specified in the XHTML standard.

Well, I have rel with all of my links in my blogroll for xfn purposes - but that’s a seperate weblog and custom fields, etc.

The problem I think with what you’re suggesting shane is that many people do not know what rel is or does or why to use it; so if you throw in that extra popup (link, title, rel) they’ll be utterly baffled and it’ll be ‘just one more click’.

but then again, maybe it’s not that bad, and lordy knows I handtype my html so what you guys do to those buttons affecteth me not.

But just to chime in on this javascript thing - theres a reason target was removed from the specs, and imo these ways of getting around that are just cheapish hacks.  Leave the choice to the end-user, don’t hijack their computer and force new windows to open.  Just my opinion and why I hope ee will never build in anything that would force us to do something like that. =)

(the rel thing wouldn’t, I just felt opinionated for a moment. )

LisaJill,

I’m not going to argue about Web ethics, but I’d really like to have targets for forms.
In this case, the user (and us) have no choice with EE.
You get the result in the same window, and that’s it.

I think PMachine should give us some choice here.

In particular, I like Search results to be in a different window, so I can browse the results in the opener window. It’s way better than trying each link and click back IMHO.

etosha, I don’t care about arguing either - my point is that it should be an option that is set (per weblog or globally, the people that want this would have to say which is more appropriate), and not forced upon us. =)

Just make it an option. I did pay for this software.

My customers request the ability to do this. My customers pay me money so I can support my family. Don’t talk to me about “compliancy”. Making my customers happy with their websites is how I put food on the table. I’m not going to be made to feel bad if there is are things about how my sites are built that some committee called the W3C decides isn’t according to their liking.

Pmachine, please add this to the code of your product so I dont have to hack the files at all. Thank you.

Sue, thanks for the link to that
It is compelling actually. I would grumble less about this if the “rel” attribute was asked for in the link creation process maybe.