[Gigaman2003]

Originally Posted by jonathan lall

Good semantic HTML coding never, ever, opens a new window. Ever. Any consumer with half a brain, perhaps less, can do that himself when he wants to, and can tell when he's leaving a site (thus negating the helping hand webmasters might think they're giving when they open external links in a new window). It's almost pretentious to say that your website should remain open for some reason when someone clicks on a link (a link to what they really want to see), but at least when it's an external link using a new window makes some sense.

Wrong. Good semantic HTML coding would be easily understandable by a screenreader, such as using ordered lists for navigation bars and header tags for titles. However I do feel the same way that sites should never open a new window by default, but i believe that there should be an option to. To the person who brought up the design and intent point, thats kind of right, but your first priority should be accessibility, not design. Opening and closing windows for small amounts of information like just displaying a photo is amazingly disorientating to a blind user (no joke intended with the photo and blindness thing). Just try using a screenreader to navigate your site, if you can't do it, don't expect a blind person to. You already know whats on your site, but he won't.