Here's another little tip for creating accessible websites. Have you ever used JavaScript to open a popup window? Well, how does the user without JavaScript see this?!

The website I've been working on converting to Domino uses popups to display items in its gallery. To recreate this in Domino I've used a view and some JavaScript. But, I did it using a technique that makes it accessible to all users and to search engines. The link produced by the view looks something like this:

<a href="/db.nsf/view/docid/" target="_blank" onclick="window.open(this.href,'win','height=400,width=300');return false;">image</a>

The norm is for there to be a blank href and to simply have the target URL passed to the .open method. With this method, if you have JavaScript enabled, the onclick event takes care of everything. It opens the popup and tells the code to do nothing else (return false). The actual link itself is never followed. If you don't have JavaScript enabled or you are a search engine the onclick event won't trigger and you simply see the page in the current window.

The drawback to this is that popups often show a bare-bones page with no navigation. What's worse though - this or no page at all!?

With the way everything is changing out there the real way to get round this is to not use popups at all. With lots of overly zealous popup-blockers around it's hard to know exactly how you links are going to behave. Get rid of them!

Here's an example link for to play with:

View an image

To disable JavaScript in Firefox open the options dialog and it's on the Web Features page. In IE you need to go to the Security tab of the Internet Options dialog and click on Custom Levels for the Internet zone: