Many people have commented that, on my websites, none of my links open in a new window. The only exception is when a client, having heard my reasoning, still insists on opening links in a new window. I’ll do it for them, but it’s really not the best practice.

Those who argue for it will tell me that I am driving my potential customers away. Maybe, but if they leave that easily, they probably weren’t all that interested anyway. With modern browsers, someone interested in staying on my site can open the link in another tab, at their choosing. I do that all the time.

There is another school of thought on the subject. It has mainly to do with accessibility issues. While it may be obvious to you that a new window opened, it isn’t to everyone. Some people have their browsers maximized so that they can see it better. When you open a new window, they may not realize it. And so, when they try to go back using the Back button on their browser, the back button doesn’t work. Also, people with poor or no vision use readers such as JAWS to read web pages and are likely to miss the fact that an entirely new window has opened. Furthermore, they have lost the ability to use the Back button.

I’ve done a lot of research on this topic and have made the decision to make my websites accessible to as many people as possible. While I’m well aware that I could lose a visitor by not opening a new window for an external link, I’m also thinking of those who will encounter problems BECAUSE I opened a new window. So for my sites, I choose NOT to open a new window.

Most browsers make it easy to open a link in a new window, or as a tab. Someone who is truly interested in my site is likely to do this if they want to follow another link. I’m also likely to irritate a visitor by opening a new window.

If you’re interested, here are just a few places that talk about this issue:
Not opening new windows - from Dive Into Accessibility
Top 10 Mistakes of Web Design - Points 1 & 2
Strict HTML 4.01 doesn’t validate when you open links in a new window

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I had a conversation recently with someone struggling to build their first e-commerce site. They were using a WYSIWYG software package that actually prevented the developer from changing the HTML. (He did find ways to change his HTML using other programs, but as soon as he did that, his WYSIWYG package could no longer work with the HTML.

This WYSIWYG package was one of those that not only uses a lot of proprietary tags in the HTML, but it also stores your site in a form OTHER THAN HTML! That takes away from the whole beautiful set up that you have on the web. You have HTML files and CSS files that are purely text files. No magic, you really can see what you get there. It really serves no purpose to store your site in another format. And I’ve heard horror stories about what happens to your site if you try to upgrade your WYSIWYG software or if the file becomes corrupted.

I was looking at this fellow’s site. He was showing me the troubles he had when he actually sold an item. There was nowhere within his WYSIWYG software that he could indicate a quantity - it always ASSUMED your quantity was 1.

So what happens if he sells an item? My first instinct, of course, is to change the quantity. Well, we can’t do that. Idea two is just to delete the item. Makes sense, especially if you won’t have more of it to sell in the future. But, all of the items for sale are laid out in a table - four items across, and however many rows are needed. So if you delete an item, you’ve broken your table structure. All of this is static HTML (even if you can’t change it, it ultimately HAS to be HTML), but with tables, if you delete a cell, you have a mess. The other items won’t shuffle to fill the space. You just have a broken site.

The puzzling thing to me about this is that there are many long-time web developers who say that tables are so much easier than standards compliant HTML and CSS.

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