Feature Proposal: Show outgoing links with a symbol

Motivation

U useful feature to distinguish outgoing links from TWiki links is to append a small arrow icon to the link.

Example: some site

The symbol might be a character, like »: some site ».

-- ArthurClemens - 31 Oct 2005

Discussion:

yep, that would be nice to have

-- SvenDowideit - 31 Oct 2005

Doesn't the LinkOptionsPlugin already do half the trick?

-- FranzJosefSilli - 31 Oct 2005

... as well as the NatSkinPlugin which also adds a target="_blank"

-- MichaelDaum - 31 Oct 2005

1. LinkOptionsPlugin does not automatically discern an outgoing link
2. We could indeed copy the functionality of NatSkinPlugin, but I would like to have it without NatSkinPlugin itself - i.e. it should be in the core.

-- ArthurClemens - 31 Oct 2005

Why not keep it as a plugin, so that it could be installed on older TWiki releases too? It is no core functionallity. If there's anything that could be split cleanly into plugins then you should go that way and don't saddle the core with it, IMO.

• With the danger we end up having a hundred plugins for all sorts of small enhancements. -- AC - 31 Oct 2005

-- MichaelDaum - 31 Oct 2005

A flexible solution is to use CSS, then it is up to the skin to render external links. For example with a class="twikiExternalLink" in the anchor tag.

• But we don't have a mechanism yet to write anything inside the class tags, except with javascript parsing. -- AC - 31 Oct 2005

-- PeterThoeny - 31 Oct 2005

Here is an example (with a too big icon)

Google

Written as:

<style type="text/css">
a.twikiExternalLink:after {content: url(%PUBURLPATH%/%TWIKIWEB%/TWikiDocGraphics/globe.gif);}
</style>

<a href="http://www.google.com/" class="twikiExternalLink">Google</a>

-- PeterThoeny - 31 Oct 2005

But this is CSS2,and not supported by IE. http://nanobox.chipx86.com/browser_support.php

-- ArthurClemens - 01 Nov 2005

That is an important reason not to use the CSS approach. Plugin or core, I do not have a strong opinion on this one. Possibly core since it is a small isolated feature that can be turned on/off by a preferences setting (like tooltip).

-- PeterThoeny - 01 Nov 2005

We've discussed this issue these days on TWikiUserGroupsInBrazil, and wrote ExternalLinkPlugin as a proof of concept.

-- AntonioTerceiro - 03 Nov 2005

ExternalLinkPlugin works great.

-- ArthurClemens - 21 Mar 2006