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Comment by keerthiko | Hacker News Reader

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).

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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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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