On Tue, 25 Mar 2008, Jay Roos wrote:

> Whenever I decide whether to link from our catalog to something external, I
> always want to know how I bring the patron back once they've found something
> they're interested in. Do you have or have you considered a way to close the
> loop and bring someone who followed a link in the catalog back to the
> catalog?

One of the few useful things that came from that whole HTML Frames
confusion was the ability to specify a 'target' to links.  if you use a
target name that's not an existing frame, it'll pop up in a new window.
(without requiring javascript to handle the popup).  if you use a
consistent name, it'll recycle the existing window:

        <a href='some_url' target='LibraryThing'>some text</a>

See the HTML specs for more details:
        http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/present/frames.html#h-16.3


There are also some common keywords to use (_top, _blank, _new), which are
widely supported, but I can't find them in the HTML docs.

...

so basically -- someone clicks on the link, it comes in a new window, and
they can close the window to return to where they were.

... the issue with sessions timing out still holds, but as the catalog is
still loaded, you might be able to do something with javascript to warn
the user that they might time out.

-Joe