Marco is right that the argument should have ended long ago. But he's 180 degress wrong about how it should have ended, at least based on the usability testing I have done or overseen.
A link in the middle of a sentence interrupts any mental session in progress. The 7th word in his post is a link...does he really think that anyone intends to click that click and never return to his site? To at least finish the sentence?
I guarantee that if he sat and watched 100 of his readers click that link, all 100 would use a contextual menu (e.g. right click) or chord (Ctrl-click) to open that link in a new window.
I could understand the argument against target=_blank back in the good ol' days of IE6 on XP, when browsers were not tabbed and OS's were not good at managing tons of windows. Back then creating new windows all over the place was annoying.
Those days are gone. With tabs and window management UI (like Expose), it is now no trouble at all for anyone to manage dozens of open web sessions at once. Adding one more is far more lightweight than whisking your readers away suddenly in the middle of a sentence.
A link in the middle of a sentence interrupts any mental session in progress. The 7th word in his post is a link...does he really think that anyone intends to click that click and never return to his site? To at least finish the sentence?
I guarantee that if he sat and watched 100 of his readers click that link, all 100 would use a contextual menu (e.g. right click) or chord (Ctrl-click) to open that link in a new window.
I could understand the argument against target=_blank back in the good ol' days of IE6 on XP, when browsers were not tabbed and OS's were not good at managing tons of windows. Back then creating new windows all over the place was annoying.
Those days are gone. With tabs and window management UI (like Expose), it is now no trouble at all for anyone to manage dozens of open web sessions at once. Adding one more is far more lightweight than whisking your readers away suddenly in the middle of a sentence.