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Re: Reason For Links Opening In New Window

for

From: Andrew Kirkpatrick
Date: Jan 8, 2007 11:10AM

> However, there is still the "front-end" of these technologies: new,
smaller, hardware and emerging alternative user-agents that may not
support concepts
> such as multiple windows.

Do you believe that web applications won't be optimized for different
environments? There will undoubtedly be a core set of functionality
that one could develop an app to use and work across, but will that
happen?

With Flash, there is only one top level window, but you can do similar
things that you can with multiple windows - you can have modal dialogs
or other "panels" that can be part of the application. You will find
that some of the interfaces for new devices you see take advantage of
Flash's capabilties for their UI.

You can do similar things with javascript within a single window also,
but the data for both the primary window and the "new" window (which
might just be a div with particular styling) need to exist in the same
page structure in the DOM, and in this case there are additional
problems for user agents in order to deliver information so users
(particularly screen reader and keyboard users) can know about and
navigate to this new content - a new window might even be easier...

AWK