Mvied Development

As many of you know by now, the attribute ‘target’ will not validate in an XHTML document. This creates quite a few problems for us because we don’t always want people leaving our site entirely. With a simple JavaScript code you can easily open external links in new windows unobtrusively!

First, make a link with the class ‘external’.

<a class="external" href="http://www.mvied.com/">MVied Designs</a>

Now apply this to an external JavaScript file named external.js and upload somewhere on your site.

function init() {
 var links = document.getElementsByTagName('a');
 for (var i=0;i < links.length;i++) {
  if (links[i].className == 'external') {
   links[i].onclick = function() {
    window.open(this.href);
    return false;
   };
  }
 }
}
 
if(document.childNodes) {
 window.onload = init;
}

And link to this javascript in your header with a script tag. Don’t forget to change the location of the javascript file to where you uploaded external.js.

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://example.com/js/external.js"></script>