ansaurus

Question

Why does using target="_blank" cause Javascript to fail?

Answer 1

A:

What happens without the

e.stop();

?

Victor 2009-10-27 09:34:21

Without the e.stop(), the goal is not recorded.

Jack7890 2009-10-28 05:39:45

Answer 2

A:

It is possible, victor is right the e.stop() is uneccessary, I can confirm that the following code successfully opens a new tab, and asynchronously alerts on the old tab (consequently making it regain focus).

<a href="" target="_blank">reload</a>

<script>

var as = document.getElementsByTagName('a');
for (var i = 0; i < as.length; i++) {
    var a = as[i];
    a.onclick = function(e) {
        setTimeout(function() {
            alert('hi hi');
        }, 1000);
    }
}

</script>

The next best thing is to have a link tracking page and route all your external links through that page.

barkmadley 2009-10-27 12:02:06

I tried this. Unfortunately the goal is not tracked, even when I use setTimeout().

Jack7890 2009-10-28 05:57:18

Answer 3

+1 A:

There might be an issue with popup blockers (I'm thinking Googlebar) stopping the window from opening, and (with the presence of onclick) preventing the onclick code from running. For example see this and this similar sounding issues other people are having.

Or it might simply be that the click handler code is throwing an error that then prevents the rest of the code from completing. See my comment to your question re how you are binding the events. e.stop() may be failing in IE.

Your hypothesis however is false. target="_blank" and onclick="..." do work together just fine.

Testcase in point: http://jsbin.com/anahe (add /edit to the url to edit the code). You may need to turn off your popup blocker(s):

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
  "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"&gt;
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
<title>Sandbox</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<script>var clickCount= 0;</script>
</head>
<body>
  <a href="http://www.google.com" target="_blank" onclick="document.getElementById('dbg').innerHTML = ++clickCount">
     open new
  </a>
  <div id="dbg"></div>
</body>
</html>

Clicking on the link opens a new window and updates the div with the number of times the linked has been clicked. Tested this in IE6, IE7, FF2, FF3.5, Chrome 2, Chrome 3, Opera 9.

Crescent Fresh 2009-10-28 15:56:34

ansaurus

tags:

views:

answers:

Why does using target="_blank" cause Javascript to fail?

related questions