Tips and Tricks for:  HTML

The Problem:   Opening a new browser window when the user clicks a link.

Sometimes you don't want to take the user off your site.  How do you get a hyperlink to open a new window.

Solution: The target attribute of the anchor tag let's you open a new window.

In the anchor link, use the target attribute.  There are two options that will open new windows, target="main" and target="new".  Here's an example:

             <a href="http://www.NovickSoftware.com" target="new">

or

             <a href="http://www.NovickSoftware.com" target="main">

I generally prefer "new" because it opens a new window each time and it becomes visible.  If you use main, and the user had clicked on an earlier link that had target="main", the link may be processed by the previously opened windows.  Since that window might not be visible, the user can be frustrated by not seeing the page they requested.