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Following up on Tim’s recent post that linked to a great article on PDFs, here’s some good advice from Jakob Nielsen on linking to PDFs and other non-web documents:

Because users frequently close document windows, the best guidelines for linking to non-Web documents are:

1. Open non-Web documents in a new browser window.
2. Warn users in advance that a new window will appear.
3. Remove the browser chrome (such as the Back button) from the new window.

All these guidelines stem from the same underlying phenomenon: the non-Web documents are native PC formats.
These formats have their own applications, each of which gives users a
set of commands and navigation options that are completely different
than the ones for browsing websites.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 29th, 2005 at 6:57 pm and is filed under Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.