Rev 1206: _blank

My understanding is that any link with rel="external" or class="exthelp" will be opened in a new window. Is that what you mean?

Oh, are we rehashing this discussion again?
Take a look at the help links under the quick post form. Those are opening in a new window right now. Those are what class="exthelp" links are in 1.3. We've just removed the inline Javascript.
As for rel="external", I don't think that's used anywhere in PunBB. However, it makes it possible for someone to write an extension to modify the parser that opens all external pages in a new window. That's not a new idea, there are several versions of that out now as modifications. Adding the ability to open rel="external" links in a new window to the Javascript simply reduces the amount of work someone would have to do. The code is there anyway for the help links, it makes sense to use it for both.

Well we shouldn't

Yup, I didn't talk about these.

Agreed, an extension that add a checkbox on PunBB to let user choose if the external links should be opened in a new window would probably be a good thing (short of that, not a good thing at all).

But it doesn't seem to work that way. It seems vanilla Pun 1.3 will open any rel="external" link on a new window, all the time. This isn't good, plus rel="external" is borderline microformat (and anyway is a common practice) and it's used in many websites. And, as I was once told, PunBB is meant to have the capability of flawlessly be integrated into an existing website.

Yup that makes more sense

However, do you really want to help people who would force upon their poor users such a window behavior only with a commented out line? I mean, as a web user, whenever I go to a website and find PunBB being their forums, I'm glad: it means mostly no gloat, fast, clean valid html, well indexed posts, and so on. With this system, I'm afraid in the future I'll find myself not so happy when a significant part of those websites will try to always open external link in a new window.

See what I mean?

Hey, I'm not telling you what to do, it's just a user feedback. But in my not-so-humble-opinion ( ) an extension with the checkbox system should be the extent of it, and should benefit everyone.

That's the biggest issue yup, but not only.

It also means that every external link inside PunBB would be almost force opened in a new window for everyone, and that's just wrong behavior, that kind of thing should be controlled by the end user, not the software writer or the webmaster.

In my opinion:

- tagging external link (but I wander how you decide what's external and what's not... if we are on forums.punbb.org, would www.punbb.org/download/ for example be external?) is good, people could use that ground to build tools on it (and I would say, adding an "external" class with the rel attribute would be nice too).

- opening specific links as popup (like contextual help, smiley selection, things like that) is good too. But I would do it with the window.open() method, to avoid using a wrong DTD attribute, and because Firefox for example would open these popup while opening _blank in a new tab (less helpful here).

- forcing default PunBB behavior to open any external link on a new window (at least, trying to) is bad; again this should be the sole decision of the end user. And it -might- +will+ conflict with site-wide policy and existing tools on link, external links, and rel="external" links.

If you want to offer the new window capability to your users (because they are bugging you to... a classic thing), I would suggest going (vanilla, official extension, or personal extension; as you prefer) the checkbox way (add a small checkbox somewhere on the UI that says "Open external link in a new window?", unchecked by default, and use a cookie to keep that data).

We are getting sidetracked. This was a quick fix to get rid of inline javascript from help links so we can get on with putting out a beta.

The reason we went with target="_blank" as opposed to window.open() is to get around the issue with broken popup stoppers (most of them).