• Spot the ISS and Space Shuttle as the fly overhead.
• Today is the day of the Vernal Equinox -- it’s officially Spring!
• There was some sort of festival on this week. I missed it ‘cos I was working.
• I’m going to BizCamp Limerick -- Are you?

First a bit of technical background for those of you that don’t use HTML. If you know this stuff already, then feel free to skip this bit. A link is created in a web page by using the anchor tag. It looks like this:

<a href=”http://www.example.com”>link text</a>

Clicking on “link text” would bring the user to the web address specified in the href part of anchor tag. (In this www.example.com). In some cases developers want the page to open in a new browser window, in which case they write the anchor tag like this:

<a href=”http://www.example.com” target=”_blank”>link text</a>

Now when the user clicks the link, a new browser window is opened to display the web page specified. It’s the target=”_blank” part of the anchor that tells the browser to open a new page. The thinking behind using this type of behaviour is that the user is not forced to navigate away from the website that spawned the new window, thereby making it easier for them to return.

However in doing so, the web developer is removing control from the user. From a Human Usability point of view, loss of user control in this way is a Bad Thing. The user should always have full control of their browser window, and removing that control will actually lead to an increased risk that they will either move on elsewhere and not come back, or will be unable to find the original site that spawned the new window. That is, it’s easier to use the back button to browse back through your history then it is to find the one window out of ten that have been opened on your desktop.

In order to ensure that websites can be properly displayed by any browser, there is an industry body that provides standards for the various web languages. This body, the W3C, is currently working on a new standard for the most basic web language – HTML 5.0.

At the moment, the current standard is HTML 4.01. In the full specification of this standard, there is no place for the target=”_blank” attribute. It’s not allowed, and technically, including it in your website breaks the standard.

The reason we still so many links opening in new pages is that there is not just one version on the current HTML standard, there are actually 3:

• HTML 4.01 Strict,
• HTML 4.01 Transitional, and
• HTML 4.01 Frameset.

Only the HTML 4.01 Strict version of the standard prohibits the use of the target=”_blank” attribute, so designers can still use it by telling the browser to use one of the other standard versions. (How this is done is a bit beyond what I’m trying to get at, but suffice to say that each page on a website has to contain a Document Type Declaration which names the version of the standard being used.)

Even if the web developer specifies the HTML 4.01 Strict version and uses the target=”_blank” attribute, the browser will still open the link in a new window? Why? Because the browser doesn’t have to follow the specifications. It is up to the browser to implement the specification as it sees fit, and to try and interpret the web developers intentions as best it can. This means that although a page may not comply with the specifications, it will still display and work as intended.

This type of behaviour is not going to change any time soon. No browser is going to go down the route of refusing to display a website because it doesn’t exactly comply with the W3C standards. Few enough web developers care about these standards, and even fewer Internet users are aware that they exist. In fact, you’d be surprised how badly most of the the W3C standards are implemented in modern browsers.

So where do we go from here? As I said before, the W3C are currently working on HTML 5.0, but that in itself is not going to stop web developers from opening new windows. Even if browsers ceased supporting the target=”_blank” attribute, there are other ways to open a new browser window using scripting.

One possible solution is that the browser developers recognise that this is a bug-bear for some people and add an option to disable this behaviour within the browser. One setting that allows the end user to decide how these type of links should be handled. Thankfully with Firefox it is possible to do this, though it does require a bit of manual editing of the Firefox preferences. Here’s how:

• Open a new tab, and in the address bar type about:config and hit enter.
• In the filter bar, type browser.link, you should be left with 3 settings:
• • browser.link.open_external
  • browser.link.open_newwindow
  • browser.link.open_newwindow.restriction
• Double click each one in turn and set the values as follows:
• • browser.link.open_external: 3
  • browser.link.open_newwindow: 3
  • browser.link.open_newwindow.restriction: 2

The changes should take effect straight away. This won’t completly solve the problem, as new windows will now open in new tabs instead, but at least they’ll all be contained within the same browser window.

You can test whether it works for you or not by clicking this link: Google in a new window

I’m sure that it would be possible to hard-code the link into the theme files, but every time the theme is changed, the changes would have to be re-coded again. There’s also the fact that every theme is slightly different, so each theme change could mean starting from scratch. Instead it’s much easier to update the WordPress database.

Updating the database will ensure that the changes are persistent across theme changes. The downside is that if you’re not careful, you could hose your entire WordPress installation. So if you’re going to do this, make a backup. I’ll say that again – backup your WordPress database before you even think of doing this.

The first step is to create a standard WordPress page. The title of the page should be the name that you want to appear in the link. In my case the page title was “paulmc.org”. Under the discussion tab on the right hand side of the writing pane, untick the “Allow Comments” and “Allow Pings” options. Don’t enter any content and publish the page.

Now it’s time to edit the WordPress database. To do this you’ll need access to phpMyAdmin. Connect to your WordPress database and look for the wp_posts table. Choose the option to browse this table. You now need to locate the entry that corresponds to the page you’ve just created. It should be the last entry in the table.

Now that you have located the page entry, it’s time to edit the database. Click the edit icon. There are two items that you need to change. The first is “post_name”. This should be changed to reflect the URL that you want to link to. If you want to link to a page that is in the root of your website, you need to use relative addressing. For example, in my case, I changed the “post_item” to “../index.php”.

The second item that needs to be changed is the “guid”. This should be changed to the full address that you’re linking to, including the “http://www”.

To apply the changes that you’ve just made, click the Go button. Exit out of phpMyAdmin and you’re ready to test your changes. Refresh your blog and test that the link takes you where you want to go.

Update: Changed the name of database entry from “post_item” to “post_name”.