I saw a tweet fly by last night. It was re-tweet with added agreement from a friend of my wife and I’s. This friend and my wife are part of a group of moms in the area (called the Big Deal Moms) who are all blogging maniacs. What’s interesting about this to me is that, while these ladies are very successful at what they do, most of them really don’t know much about the underpinnings of the web.

Please understand that I have the highest regard for the folks out there marketing themselves and their ideas on the web. It’s a tough business and it’s even tougher without a technical education in programming or design. The specific case described served as a catalyst for this post, but I mean no ill will toward Erin.

WordPress allows you to "open a link in a new window".

With the amazing amount of blogging tools available these days, most providing the temptation to open links in a new window,  it’s quite easy to make this choice.

The premise of the aforementioned tweet is this:

Use target=’_blank’ in all of your anchor tags so that users can quickly get back to your site.

When I read this tweet, it got me thinking a little about how much misinformation is out there. To be honest, most folks are well intentioned and really have no idea if this stuff is true or not. This really is a trite example, but it is worth taking a stand on. So, I tried to quickly find the Jakob Nielson article from back in 1999 that mentions how confusing this can be. I don’t know if this really served any purpose. Erin’s response highlighted to me the real source of the problem. Most people out there reading mommy blogs don’t really know that you can simply hold down the control (or apple) key when you click a link to request your browser to open this page in a new window (or tab). If they understood this, it would be fine to leave off the target attribute, thus allowing the user to decide how they want to open any link at any time.

And Now, My Confession

While the web-standards part of me agrees 100% with Mr. Nielson, I must admit that I’ve used the target attribute incorrectly on customer sites. Granted, it was because I was asked to do so, but this functionality is so widespread that it’s become what people expect/want. I know that it breaks the back button. I know that it’s deprecated. I know that it forces an undesirable behavior on my users. I even understand the ramifications this has on my site’s statistics. Yet, with all of this knowledge, I’ve still given in.

The Solution

The only thing I can think to do as a possible step toward solving these kinds of problems is to continue to educate people. It’s only through intentional conversations, guiding my clients or friends on these decisions, that any problem like this can be fixed. I know, this probably seems like overkill for such a minute distinction as the proper use of the anchor tag’s target attribute. But, I have to take a stand sometime, right?