> My Web team and I are discussing whether or not we should open links to PDFs > and other non-html pages in a new window. Someone cited Jakob Nielsen's > argument at http://www.useit.com/alertbox/open_new_windows.html as the > reason we should open in a new window. (We all work on government Web sites > and they are about to release a new set of linking standards.) > > I know this is an old school type question, but we are very divided about > this. The people on our usability team are with Nielsen, but others (like > me) are not so sure. Isn't accessibility to new windows a problem as it > changes the focus? What do you think?
I'll go out on a limb and say 'niether' -> allow the user to save the document locally, becuase: - opening a non-web document in a browser, causes the browser to freeze while the application gets loaded; on a slow machine, this can be upwards of a minute or two. - you cant switch tabs to continue working, while the application loads - often browser plugins dont support a "save to desktop" option - some plugins are notoriously buggy, so as website designer you shouldn't encourage the browser to crash (an thus destroying the history of every other tab in the process - firefox/opera not withstanding), just to display your non-web document, eg: some older versions of Acroread come to mind as causing much frustration in this regard. - most browser plugins have a cut-down feature set from the full product, making them quite unhelpful to use. In any case, it is possible to detect if the browser supports a given plugin (eg: pdf, doc, etc) -> so it becomes possible to supply the user with the most appropriate format. For example: the purpose of pdf's is for offline reference or for printing - if the browser doesn't support pdf, the server could reasonably assume that the user doesn't have native pdf support. Then a suitable message could be displayed accordingly. Alternatively the server could convert the pdf to html and thus be able to at least render it (probably quite awfully) within the browser. regards, Mathew Robertson ******************************************************************* List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: memberh...@webstandardsgroup.org *******************************************************************
