Targetting Frames in XHTML
This isn't so much an article as it is a tip. I'm writing this as I finish converting the Martian Software website to XHTML 1.1. The previous incarnation of this site (HTML 4.0 Transitional) relied upon the target attribute of the <a> tag to use a new frame for links outside the site, and to consistently reuse the same frame for all javadoc links. It worked great.
Once I switched to XHTML, however, I quickly found that target is no longer a built-in attribute for <a> tags. It could be done with some DTD gymnastics, but that seemed a ridiculous amount of effort just to retain some simple functionality. Then I found this article by Kevin Yank which provided a pretty clever method: mark the links you want to launch in a new window using the rel attribute, and massage the DOM with a little javascript. I won't repeat the reasoning here (it's a good article - go read it), but I think it's a great solution that, although it relies upon javascript, degrades quite gracefully.
It didn't totally fit my needs, however. I wanted to re-use frames as well rather than keep launching new windows. So I made a couple of tweaks:
- To launch in a new window, set rel="external" for the link.
- To launch in a specific frame, set rel="external:framename" for the link, where framename is the name of the targetted frame.
It works great, and it's used everywhere on this website. The modified script is included below.