/*
http://www.sitepoint.com/print/standards-compliant-world/
Much to the chagrin of Web designers everywhere, the HTML 4.0 Strict and XHTML 1.0 Strict recommendations of the W3C no longer include the target attribute of the tag. The Transitional versions of the specifications still include it, but by definition, these specs are on the way out.
Whatever your personal feelings on the practice, the most common application for this attribute -- opening a link in a new browser window with target="_blank" -- is still useful on today's Internet. So if the standards say we shouldn't use it, how should we go about creating new-window links, while following the latest Web standards?
Before:
external link
After:
external link
As this is the kind of script you'll want to deploy across your entire site, you should copy this code into a separate file (e.g. external.js), and then load it in every page on your site with the following code, which should appear in the tag of each document:
If the target attribute of the tag is being phased out, does it really make a difference whether we're setting it with JavaScript instead of HTML? Sure, the page will validate against the HTML 4.0 Strict and XHTML 1.0 Strict Document Type Definitions, but aren't we technically cheating?
The answer is no. The Document Object Model (DOM), which governs the document objects and attributes that are available to JavaScript code, is a totally separate standard from (X)HTML. Also consider that the DOM 2.0 standard that was published in January 2003 (well after XHTML 1.0, let alone HTML 4.0) still includes this attribute. It seems clear that while this attribute is slated to be phased out of (X)HTML, it will be available to JavaScript through the DOM for the foreseeable future.
A number of other standards-compliant new-window link scripts out there propose using window.open() to load the document in a new window. While this approach generally works well on the surface, its downfall is that most browsers do not correctly report the referring URL in the request for the new page, which can be a serious issue, especially in inter-site links.
*/
function newWindowLinks()
{
if (!document.getElementsByTagName) return;
var anchors = document.getElementsByTagName ("a") ;
for (var i = 0 ; i < anchors.length ; i++)
{
var anchor = anchors[i] ;
if (anchor.getAttribute("href"))
{
if (anchor.getAttribute("rel") == "external")
anchor.target = "_blank";
if (anchor.getAttribute("rel") == "pdf")
anchor.target = "_blank";
}
}
}
window.onload = newWindowLinks;