“Reading an article”, in my opinion, doesn’t qualify here. A link to something like “shipping information” should be openable without them losing their place in checkout. Of course, you don’t want to lose customers during their checkout process. If you do leave to another site (or your browser crashes), we save the state of the editors in localStorage so you don’t lose work.Ĭheckout is another case here.links in the footer) have normal behavior, but we detect if you have unsaved changes in the editor and prompt you to save them before you leave. ), that you only see while interacting with the editor, open in a new tab. Links that go to other pages that are explicitly “learn more” style links (e.g.I think of CodePen where users are often writing code. Did I just lose everything I was doing?Įven if you do something to ensure they don’t lose that work, putting someone through that panic may as well be avoided. Clicking a link and changing pages can be a heart-pounding, awful moment on the web. A Good Reason: The user is working on something on the page, that might be lost if the current page changed. When the media isn’t playing, links are in their normal state.Īlthough as I say that, I check YouTube, and they don’t bug you about it 2 when changing videos. If the media is playing, handle links in a special way. At that point, you are trying to do right by them and have them not leave their place. At that point, either have links open in new tabs or ask them if they are sure they want to leave the page. A Good Reason: There is user-initiated media playing Just forcing links to open in new tabs so that problem never comes up is avoiding your job. Handling that tricky problem is your job. Coming “back” to an infinite scroll page should take you to where you left off in most cases. It can be good UX in one sense because it can deliver content without interruption. A Bad Reason: It’s on an infinite-scroll page We want our users to feel good about us.Īnd hopefully, your calm and educated approach will help your client feel good about you. We don’t want to force our desires on users and potentially frustrate them for such a small thing. There are some reasons why we might want to break that behavior, and we can go over those, but for most links, we don’t. The default behavior is for links to open normally. If they don’t trust you with this, what do they trust you about? But it’s weird this has to be a fight at all. I get the “I don’t want to pick this fight” thing, since we only have so much energy. A Bad Reason: My client wants it that way
#When i click on a link it opens a new tab download#
For starters, using the download attribute. If you want to help users download it without actually opening it, that’s a worthy UX goal but can be approached differently. Why should that be so different? You can still use the back button to come back from it. I’ve heard from a lot of people that this is “a convention.” As in the way it’s supposed to be done.
You understand that normal style links are ideal, but if that means a user leaves your site, you’re willing to break that ideal. This is related to the above two reasons, only perhaps worse.
We’ll have “internal” links (links that point to our own site) behave normally, but “external” links (links that point to other sites) open in a new window/tab.
A Bad Reason: “Internal” links and “External” links are different. Our site is more important and should never be left behind. Other sites should have normal-style links, but our site is special. A Bad Reason: Just because you want users to never leave your page.īranding branding branding! Eyeballs baby. That also means that if you like opening new tabs, you can, and you don’t have to impart that behavior on anyone else.īy using target="_blank", only that behavior is available. That means both behaviors are available to them for links. It is also worth noting that users can force a link to open in a new window/tab by -clicking a link. If other people use the site, leave it be. If it’s an internal tool just for you, do whatever you want. And thus less comfortable with your forcing of a different behavior. That’s wonderful for you, but it is safe to assume most users are most comfortable with the default behavior. Perhaps you’ve developed a personal taste for opening all links in new windows/tabs. Links opening within the same page is the default behavior (as if the link had target="_self" on it).
Like it or not, target="_blank" is a change in default behavior. But are there good reasons to do so?Ī Bad Reason: Because you like it that way. This used to be “invalid” in HTML (maybe only XHTML?) but people used it anyway since it worked. One of the possible values of that attribute is _blank, which tells the browser to open a new window (or tab, if that’s the user’s preference) when that link is clicked. Anchor links 1 may have a target attribute which controls what happens when that link is clicked.
0 kommentar(er)
