target="_blank"

I read a lot of blogs. That BlogRoll on the right represents a lot of them, but not all. I read a lot of news and opinion sites, too. As Pilot once said, "I don't get out much, so I read."

And of all the sites I read, only one -- James Lileks's The Bleat -- consistently uses the 'target="_blank" ' tag for links outside of the site.

What is it? It's a piece of HTML, a tag. You put it inside the angle brackets with along with the "href=[url]" tag.

What does it do? It opens the link in a new window.

Why would you want to do that?
Think about it this way: don't you want people to read everything you've written, and not navigate away the first time they hit a link? Sure, it's easy to hit the Back button, but it's also just as easy to close that window, forgetting that you were in the middle of reading someone's blog.

Ok -- maybe that's just me, but I do get annoyed with myself when I realize I didn't mean to close that window!

Now I try to shift-click on links when I know I want to continue with the source, but of course I forget sometimes.

There are folks who are anti-new-window-spawning; they may be using machines with more limited resources, and my heart goes out to them. Computers are so cheap these days and the amount of processing power out there is really astonishing, so I tend to forget that not everyone has a screaming machine. But even when I'm using my nearly-5-year-old laptop I still want to open new windows when I click on a link... yeah, I'm done reading the text before the graphics all load, but that's OK.

I must conclude that I'm in the minority in caring about this, since nearly no one else does it. Is it that no one else wants to bother with the extra tag in their HTML? Or do only total web-addicts like me even give this stuff a thought? Or is just that folks figure that the people who want the extra window will ask for it by pressing the shift key? Does the general web-reading population know you can open a new window by shift-clicking on a link?

Clearly I have too much time on my hands. Not really, but this is a pretty good distraction from stuff I'm trying to ignore.