[keerthiko]

For the people complaining about the 'target="_blank" thing,' I'm guessing the user has to do a little bit of UX for themselves to use this site.

What works for me to make this a reasonable experience is to keep the index page open, open a chapter, read it, close it, open the next one. Not entirely terrible. Just use Cmd/Ctrl+W instead of the back button. Not really that bad, especially considering that's how I've preferred to use sites I want to see more than one thing from anyway (like wc3.org, google results, shopping search results, etc).

[sutterbomb]

The guide is more akin to a book than to looking at disparate options and comparing (google results, shopping etc.)

Would you expect someone to read a book by looking at the table of contents, going to a chapter, going back to the TOC, going to the next chapter?

It's not that the site is impossible to use - it's that a fairly basic and fundamental part of the UX is broken, yet the entire thing is a guide about UX. It just makes it harder to believe that they have expertise in the field when they aren't practicing it on their own work.

[B0Z]

Just my $0.02, but it seems to me that if the site is akin to a book as you say, wouldn't the behavior you're suggesting doesn't make sense (TOC, chapter, TOC, chapter) work for a technical reference? The successive pages are certainly quite brief but in a way, isn't it a technical reference?

[keerthiko]

This, exactly. I pretty much treat everything on the internet as technical reference, I never sit and click "Next page" and read through anything but forums. Everything else I like to keep my handle on how I got there, and then successively look at the page that looks most relevant to my current needs. This works pretty well for this too. I never intended to read this from top to bottom.

However, I do 100% agree that "Next" and "Previous" buttons should never be target="_blank". That's a pretty unnatural and terrible experience. Only chapter links and external references should be.

[sutterbomb]

Ah, sorry perhaps I wasn't being clear.

At the end of each individual post, there's a link to see the next one. It's very much the same concept as your next/previous buttons, which you agreed shouldn't be opened in a new window. That's primarily what I take issue with.

Personally I'd also argue that the TOC shouldn't be new windows either, that the user should have to take explicit action to follow a link in a non-standard way. But reasonable people can disagree about the merits of this in certain cases.

Sharlin's comment below also touches on this.

[Sharlin]

The real problem is that the "next chapter" links at the end of each chapter also open the next chapter in a new window - something that's certainly unwanted by almost everyone.