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Filed under Lab on August 2, 2006 by Chris LoSacco

Introducing : External Link

As the "target _blank" debate rages on, the Arc90 developers have come up with a novel solution to this vexing (and hotly disputed) problem. We've released External Link over in the lab, a useful script that adds a new window icon to outward facing links. It's a best-of-both-worlds approach that lets the user maintain control, and it works like a charm.

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Anyone else have luck with this? I've been trying for an hour and haven't come up with anything yet. Even loading everything from the zip to my site doesn't even get the sample.htm to show up like it does here.

Posted on August 15, 2006 10:20 PM by Kurt

Kurt -

There is a small bug with our example page - it uses the wrong class name (externallink). Please follow the directions on the lab page to properly install the script (i.e. use the "extlink" class name).

If you have any other problems, point us to your site. Thanks for your interest.

Posted on August 15, 2006 11:32 PM by Chris LoSacco

Great code. Have a tweak ? for you though.

How can you make the new window link text and image:

Example

The original Link [ Open in a New Window NEWwinIMAGE ]

Posted on November 29, 2006 3:35 PM by finch.31

Found an issue.

This does not appear to work on IE6/7 w/ W3C website using their referrer method. I get a can't find referrer error whenever I use in IE, works fine in Firefox.

Also the entire script does not work in Opera, no java errors either????

Posted on November 29, 2006 9:18 PM by Finch.31

Nice code! I modified it to spit out different icons depending on what I'm linking to (PDF/DOC/XLS/PPT) which saves a considerable amount of effort on our Intranet.

Posted on January 29, 2007 4:26 PM by freeheelvrmnt

freeheel -

That's a fantastic idea. Great, natural extension to our script. Good stuff.

Posted on January 30, 2007 8:24 AM by Chris LoSacco

I've just tried your demo, but each time I go to a link in the same tab by clicking on the text and then use the back button (I'm using firefox) I get the link text followed by yet another external link icon, ie. after doing it 3 times each text link now has 3 icons after the text, 4 after 4 etc...

Posted on September 23, 2007 9:40 PM by Colin McCubbin

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