Valid XHTML - target in links

javascript | Updated on 04-02-2008 01:59:06pm

Sometimes you need a link to open in a new window. For me, I wanted to give access to some of the behind the scenes things, such as what the HTML looks like once it's processed. Well I come to find out that target= is out (deprecated) and no longer used. In fact there isn't a replacement for it.

After finding a few explanations about it and what you can do to get around it, I settled on a great site for help.

Sitepoint has been a great friend to me over the years and I found exactly what I needed once I searched. It's really a javascript work around, but it does the trick.

Instead of target you use rel="external" and then let the javascript handle the rest.

 

function externalLinks() { if (!document.getElementsByTagName) return; var anchors = document.getElementsByTagName("a"); for (var i=0; i<anchors.length; i++) { var anchor = anchors<blockquote class='i_quote'><div class='i_header'></div><div class='i_code'><pre>; if (anchor.getAttribute("href") && anchor.getAttribute("rel") == "external") anchor.target = "_blank"; } } window.onload = externalLinks;

Simple enough right?

For more indepth explanation of this you can visit Sitepoint, and read the article here.