Guest Proposition: Target:_blank

(this post was written by Kyle on April 28, 2009, and it concerns & & )

[Editor's Note: This post is written by Eliot Johnston, an avid reader and active member of our little Fluid Imagination community.]

So I was discussing things with Kyle a little while ago, and a certain subject came up that found us in a disparity. I found something that I wanted to see changed on this blog, and Kyle was at odds with my desire. He recommended letting you, the readers, decide, and he would comply with the majority. So here I am (quite some time later), writing to see what you think.

This blog, like practically every blog, is covered in external links that take you to all the sites out there that Kyle or others have found, allowing you to peruse their content for the riches contained therein. My problem is that I will click on a link to, say, a multi-page article, read through it, and then I have to click the back button a bunch of times to get to FI again, because I wasn’t done with the blog.

My proposition is to include a property in all external links that will open the new site in a new tab (or window, depending on your browser setting), so that when you are done with that site, you can click the tab (or window) closed and there you are on FI, right where you left off.

Kyle’s point is that anyone can do this with any link at any time by right-clicking the link and selecting “Open in new tab” from the drop-down menu. He likes to leave that kind of choice in the user’s hands.

While I respect his respect for the user, I feel like

  1. doing that is counter-intuitive;
  2. my crappy ancient iMac only has one dang button on the mouse, which demands using the keyboard and the mouse to pull off Kyle’s little trick, and the hell with that.

So the question posed to you is: Ease or Choice?

Would you rather the site automatically create a new tab (or window) when you click on an external link, or would you rather Kyle leave the choice in your hands?

This is not the hugest deal out there, I know, but I did kind of want to get some of my own content on this blog :-)

Please let Kyle know which you prefer in the comments to this post.