Well I seem to have sparked off some interesting discussion in my post about Accessibility - note the title of the post!
In reply to Paul's "it's the way it should be done' comment. It's not the way it should be done at all, and in fact it can be annoying for peeps who have difficulties. It's the way you'd like it to be done... the two are compeltly unrelated.
I'm amazed that the response of folks here is that they like it! Most peoples site's I've read hate it (and me personally). So I've decided, really it's down to you, the user, to choose when you want to open up a new window or not.
You have the choice to open up in the same window or a new window for every link you open (on my site1 at least). If you do the wrong thing and moan, it's your fault for being a crap surfer and not knowing how to use a webbrowser, not mine for not designing the site how you wish it to be - it's quite simple really. Don't come back to me with crap about shouldn't having to know how to use a webbrowser, that's just plain crap. "I'm annoyed that this thing I've got isn't doing what I want, because I've not actually bothered to use the thing properly" is a lame ass excuse.
If you want to open new windows while you browse, go right ahead. In Internet Explorer for Windows, hold down the Shift key while you click a link to open the link in a new window. In Netscape 6 and Mozilla, hold down Control. In Internet Explorer for Mac, hold down Command. (Some browsers such as Opera support advanced combinations like Control + Shift + click to open a link in a new window in the background.)
... and it Opera click with the right hand button of the mouse and drag down.
Opening new links in new windows also breaks the back button - which is a huuuge huuuuge hate of mine.
Anyway, it's reading the Dive Into Accessibility guide thing that lead me to change the way you visited links on the site. Have a good read of it if you care.
The more I read on the subject of windows popping up, the more stubborn I've put my stance on adding back the target="_blank"s to the links. I was going to change things back depending on the vote2, but now the more I think about it, the more I've decided that it's just all kinds of wrong.
Ed's statement on links is as follows:
If you want links to open in a new window then I'm not going to stop you, but I'm not going to stop you from opening up links in the same window either. If you don't know how to do this, then learn how to use your web browser correctly.
1I don't use silly JavaScript things that you can't do anything with other than what was intented - these are also plain wrong.
2Which actully defines that what annoys you not what you would like to happen anyways... hmmm.