Last modified: 2012-10-01 18:49:39 UTC
The processes|actions on links we deal-with are: 1) in a browser: a) link activating. 2) in a source-editor: a) link-text editing, b) link-target editing. 3) in a wysiwyg-editor: a) link-text editing, b) link-target editing c) link activating|following. In VisualEditor (wysiwyg) link-activation is not yet implemented. So far I have seen 3 methods for this: i) double clicking ii) ctrl + clicking iii) popup the target, where you can activate the link. I am using everyday a local hypertext wysiwyg editor for 20 years now (yes before html!!!) which uses the double-click method. I vote for this as the fastest and using only one hand.
Double click also associates with actions like the word selection, and doing link following on double click might not fit with that well as definitely alot of users while editing would want to use double click to select a word rather than expecting a new window opening the target of that link.
Morever, showing the target in a popup on single click over the link might be a good idea.
I'd recommend us doing options 2 (ctrl-clicking) and 3 (inspector offers opportunity to follow in new tab); this is behaviour in Google Docs and is a reasonable compromise. :-)
Mass-moving items into VisualEditor product
Mass-move out of "General" to "ContentEditable".
Right-click to open context menu followed by 'open in new tab' etc would be the obvious thing, but this doesn't work because the link is actually to '#' instead of to the link target.
I think there's some value in over-riding the natural link so that clicking on it (say to edit it) doesn't launch a new window (otherwise the editing experience would suck).
We can override the behavior via JavaScript while retaining the original href; we do this sort of thing all the time, such as for the "Edit" tab link itself. :)
Standardise title.
There's 2 things here I want to pick out. 1. Using the actual URL instead of "#" in the rendered HTML so you can right click and say "Open in new tab" or "Copy URL". 2. Adding features to the link dialog, in this case adding a link that will open the link target in a new tab. To the first point, this is going to happen, the use of # has always been a hack and will go away soon. Especially since we can't perform copy and paste from JavaScript due to security issues with clipboard access, it's important to us to retain the native menus and selection systems on all devices. As for the link inspector, we are still experimenting with this design but essentially our use of lightweight inline dialog-like "inspectors" is going to increase over time. The link inspector right now is very primitive, but will soon have the ability to provide suggestions and validation for link targets as you type. We will be adding other things too, such as a link to launch the target in a new tab, as we believe they are needed and they will remain if they can be proven worthy of the screen space in user testing.
Resolved with I1a1cfd70c222dd1d686b46cd702edf2e9d0e5bae
