The search engine ranking of a web site is very important nowadays. As usually every optimisation means an complexification of the code, many developpers just pay that price. It's mostly paid with a javascriptification of the links that we don't want to be followed, and javascriptification of functional dialog popups.

There's an other approch to this. It still makes heavy use of Javascript, but :

  • your site will still work as intended even with javascript disabled
  • your site will be much more maintenable

The idea is to post-process the links with a Javascript function that is triggered just before the end of the loading of the page. Usually it can be done with a body-onLoad, or a <script/> element at the bottom of the page. This script parses all the <a/> elements, and decodes the classes added to it. If you encode the classenames like this code :

<a
href="my_popup.html"
class="medium_popup pp/popup">
        explain these words
</a>

We can see that the classes of the link are medium_popup, that is handled normally by the browser, and pp/popup is used by the post-processing code to add a onClick() handler that could be expressed as onClick="javascript:open_popup('my_popup.html');return false;".

The big advantage is that you can very simply add popup to your links, web-spiders knows how to go to your popup with all your shiny glossary, and so can users without javascript or just open in a new tab with a middle-click on some browsers.

If it's a dialog box to ask some more informations, you can encode the link like that :

<a
href=""
class="medium_popup pp/link/my_dialog.html">
        choose the date
</a>

This way pp/link/my_dialog.html will be parsed and the href will be dynamically replaced with my_dialog.html.

You can even later add a pp/popup after the pp/link/my_dialog.html, and have the dialob box magically opened in a popup.

I'll post later some example code to parse it.