Target denied

Oliver Brown

2005-08-14 (Last Modified: 2005-08-14) — This upcoming video may not be available to view yet.

I found something out today that really caught me by surprise. It makes sense in theory but in practice I think it’s a bad idea. Not doing it would just be a slight niggle on purists.

The target attribute of a tags is no longer allowed in HTML (HTML 4.01 Strict and XHTML 1.0 Strict). This is technically correct since HTML is for marking structure of a document and opening things in different windows is a user-interface issue and hence is within the domain of javascript. What’s really odd though is the suggested workaround. Mark tags that need to open in a different frame or window somehow (rel="external" for instance) and then use a javascript function to give all those links a target attribute. Seems silly to me.