NYCPHP Meetup

[John Campbell]

I don't know why this isn't working, but using window.open is a
terrible practice.

What is wrong with:

<a href="http://face..." target="friend">Become a friend on Facebook:</a>

If you do it that way it loads in a new tab, which is much faster than
creating a new window, and doesn't irritate the user.  Why would you
want to create a window that is not resizable and without a location
bar?  That is just plain rude.  Thank god all decent browsers ignore
it.

-John Campbell

On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 1:56 PM, David Roth <davidalanroth at gmail.com> wrote:
> I was successfully using Javascript code for years to open a new browser
> window and assign it a unique name without any problems. That is, until now.
> :-)
> The following Javascript code works properly with any other website I've
> tried, except for facebook.com:
>
> <a href="javascript: void(0)"
>    onclick="window.open('http://facebook.com/USERNAME_GOES_HERE',
>   'windowname1',
>   'width=600, \
>    height=500, \
>    directories=no, \
>    location=no, \
>    menubar=no, \
>    resizable=no, \
>    scrollbars=1, \
>    status=no, \
>    toolbar=no');
>   return false;">Become a friend on Facebook:</A>
>
> The above action, will open a window, but if the visitor to the web page
> clicks on that same link again, it opens yet another new window. It
> shouldn't do that, because 'windowname1' should simply cause the user to
> bring that window up front, not create a duplicate window each time the link
> is clicked.
> I have tried variations of the above code, but they all fail as I described
> when it comes to facebook.com, but works well on many other websites I
> tried.
> I'm not a web browser guru, so I can only guess at how the internals of it
> work for assigned 'windowname1'. But here is my theory and I'd greatly
> appreciate comments on this. I suspect that when facebook.com is loaded it
> immediately renamed the assigned window to some unique window name perhaps
> with embedded UNIX time stamp to make it extremely unique. If my theory is
> correct, is there any way to have your own window name be used instead? Or
> is there some other Javascript coding method to accomplish this with
> Facebook.com that someone is just itching to tell me about?  If my theory is
> wrong about facebook.com, can someone explain why they might be doing this
> and what advantage is there to Facebook.com being more difficult than the
> other websites? :-)
> Thanks in advance,
> David Roth
>
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