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From: Subhash Chhetri
Date: Thu, Sep 05 2013 11:54PM
Subject: About external / link opens in new window
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Hi All,

Is there any special tag or attribute in html markup itself to indicate external link or link that opens in new window?, Or don’t you think it should be?

I’m writing this because adding “external link”, or something like “opens in new window” with such link may not always fruitful, cause it increases a bit of page size leading performance impact, Generally, where multiple such links exist.

But if we have an universal accepted principle for such, it can be beneficial from both accessibility and usability perspective.


Best Regards,
Subhash Chhetri
Software Accessibility QA Engineer at QA Infotech, India

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Fri, Sep 06 2013 12:09AM
Subject: Re: About external / link opens in new window
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2013-09-06 8:54, Subhash Chhetri wrote:

> Is there any special tag or attribute in html markup itself to
> indicate external link or link that opens in new window?

The rel attribute in <a> elements may be used to indicate the link type,
but no consensus or common practice has been achieved on its use.
According to HTML5 CR, link types may be registered at
http://microformats.org/wiki/existing-rel-values#HTML5_link_type_extensions
According to it (at present), rel=external “indicates that the
referenced document is not part of the same site as the current
document”. There is probably very little software support to such an
attribute, but if you wanted to standardize things, you could try to
persuade the world to use rel=external and to support it in software
(whatever that might mean).

The attribute target="_blank" is the HTML way of specifying that a link
be opened in a new window or tab ("browsing environment", to use the
general term). But it's common to open new windows with JavaScript
window.open(), and this cannot be recognized from HTML markup.

> I’m writing this because adding “external link”, or something like
> “opens in new window” with such link may not always fruitful, cause
> it increases a bit of page size leading performance impact,
> Generally, where multiple such links exist.

I would sat that increase in page size is among the least of problems
here. I would be more worried about the potential annoyance factor. Does
the user care whether the link is external? Regarding new windows, *if*
you open them from a web page, this should normally be said loud and
clear in the content of the page, instead of relying on some HTML markup
or CSS styling for links.

Yucca