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Re: Title attributes on images and links

for

From: Dean Hamack
Date: Aug 5, 2009 11:45AM

Hi Karl, responses to your points inline

On 8/5/09 9:52 AM, "Karl Groves" < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> In frustration, they begin closing the browser. Now, what you might
> expect is that they'd close this "new" window and realize along the way
> that your original site is there underneath in the "original" window.
> What actually happened, surprisingly, is that they somehow got to thinking
> that the only way they could get back to your site was to start over
> entirely from the beginning - shutting down all browser windows entirely
> and starting anew.
>
> The bottom line: Opening new windows via 'target' causes lost, frustrated
> users. Frustrating users is really bad business.

Which is exactly what happens to me when I open a pdf in the same window.
Can't please all of the people all of the time I guess.

> I haven't worked out a solution, but one previous co-worker hypothesized
> that we could avoid this problem by purposely making the new window
> significantly smaller (something like 60% of full window size) via
> JavaScript.

Yep. In fact, that is the only way to open new windows and still have your
site validate as XHTML strict. In their infinite wisdom, the w3c decided to
deprecate the target attribute and force developers to use javascript to do
this very simple task.

I generally use a little icon to indicate that a link will be opened in a
new window (like the little arrows on wikipedia). I also use a title
attribute that says "open this link in a new window". But as was mentioned
earlier, this doesn't help the screenreader user much.

Unfortunately, this is one of those issues where there is no perfect
solution.