5 ms·

The answer is a little unsatisfying to me. It says that "blank" ca be a frame name, but doesn't say why "_blank" can't be.

tomhoward 2y ago
Yeah it’s not a great explanation. To me (and I’m of the era they’re describing so I used it a lot) it’s simply that _blank is a reserved keyword that means open the link in a new, unnamed window. Other reserved keywords for “target” are _self (default value), _parent, and _top. https://www.w3schools.com/TAgs/att_a_target.asp https://www.w3schools.com/TAgs/att_a_target.asp
- _qib3 2y ago
  But why was _name the naming syntax for reserved keywords, specifically?
  - beejiu 2y ago
    I suspect, when the specification was created, "_" was already popular for private/reserved members in many programming languages. In C++, for instance, you can only start an identifier with a letter or an underscore. So it seems like a natural, intuitive choice. Whether anyone can find any corroborating evidence would be interesting.
  - Sharlin 2y ago
    Probably inspired by C and C++ which reserve names starting with an underscore for the implementation (more precisely, they reserve names starting with `_[_A-Z]` everywhere, and all other names starting with `_` in the global scope only).
    - yetihehe 2y ago
      I nice factoid: in Erlang, `_` if functional. It means "I don't care about this variable". When pattern matching you can put `_` to not bind value in function or pattern to anything or prepend a variable with `_` to tell compiler that you won't be using it, but it's there for "documentation" purposes. For example `[A|_]=List` will extract first element of list into A and ignore rest of list. Underscore has some other uses too.
      - Sharlin 2y ago
        Yes, many languages use `_` as a placeholder name, and at least in Rust any name starting with `_` is considered intentionally unused.
        hunter2_ 2y ago
        Aside: many IRC clients would auto-append _ when registering a nick if the desired nick was already registered. Why _? Who knows.
        Sharlin 2y ago
        Probably because it has no specific meaning and being almost whitespace is the easiest to mentally ignore out of the set of valid nickname characters. `-` is another candidate but a programmer used to C-like languages will likely intuitively pick `_` just because it’s valid in identifiers unlike `-`.
  - ramesh31 2y ago
    >But why was _name the naming syntax for reserved keywords, specifically? As with so many things in software engineering, the answer comes down to "some programmer in the 70s working on a UNIX system had to make an arbitrary decision about something, and no one ever had a good reason to change it again."
  - lazide 2y ago
    Most other characters you would use aren’t valid HTML, and originally you could say things like target=foo (no quotes) and it would work.
- 0x0 2y ago
  Also worth noting that "_new" is NOT a reserved keyword, but it is sometimes mistakenly used instead of "_blank". Which can lead to funny behavior if you are visiting 2 or more sites making this mistake, as the links could then start opening in windows that were initially opened by the other site. Or least that's how it was back in the days of popup windows, before tabs and popup blockers became the norm.
  - shkkmo 2y ago
    Not just weird behavior, but possible security issues. Browsers now automatically add a rel="noopener" to links that target _blank to prevent the opened site from gaining full access to your javascript object. Targeting _new does not do this unless you explicity add the rel="noopener" yourself. https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/4078 https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/4078 https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Attributes/rel/noopener https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Attributes...
    - cxr 2y ago
      Nobody gets "full access" to your "javascript object"—whatever that even means; pages from different origins will still run into exceptions when trying to diddle the opener. There is a small, well-known set of (safe) properties that are excluded from the restrictions—like location. But the noopener behavior, by making opener null, does stop other pages from setting even opener.location, which could ordinarily be used to programmatically send the user to another page.
dcminter 2y ago
I'm guessing it was possible before the window-opening behaviour came in (unless it was always there from the genesis of frameset), but it was assumed that the underscore prefixed version would be less likely to conflict with existing code than without. I'd be interested to hear either a citation proving or disproving that guess though.
Maken 2y ago
In other answer they link to the original specification [1], and it says that names must start with a letter, so anything preceded by "_" cannot be a frame name. [1] https://www.w3.org/TR/WD-frames-970331#frame https://www.w3.org/TR/WD-frames-970331#frame
- stickfigure 2y ago
  This one sentence is better than the original article.
  - hbn 2y ago
    That sentence wouldn't have made sense to me before I read the original article. I got into web dev after HTML5, I've never heard of <frameset>
- n_plus_1_acc 2y ago
  Thanks
bazoom42 2y ago
Frame names must start with an alphanumerical character.

tomhoward 2y ago

Yeah it’s not a great explanation. To me (and I’m of the era they’re describing so I used it a lot) it’s simply that _blank is a reserved keyword that means open the link in a new, unnamed window. Other reserved keywords for “target” are _self (default value), _parent, and _top. https://www.w3schools.com/TAgs/att_a_target.asp https://www.w3schools.com/TAgs/att_a_target.asp

_qib3 2y ago
But why was _name the naming syntax for reserved keywords, specifically?
- beejiu 2y ago
  I suspect, when the specification was created, "_" was already popular for private/reserved members in many programming languages. In C++, for instance, you can only start an identifier with a letter or an underscore. So it seems like a natural, intuitive choice. Whether anyone can find any corroborating evidence would be interesting.
- Sharlin 2y ago
  Probably inspired by C and C++ which reserve names starting with an underscore for the implementation (more precisely, they reserve names starting with `_[_A-Z]` everywhere, and all other names starting with `_` in the global scope only).
  - yetihehe 2y ago
    I nice factoid: in Erlang, `_` if functional. It means "I don't care about this variable". When pattern matching you can put `_` to not bind value in function or pattern to anything or prepend a variable with `_` to tell compiler that you won't be using it, but it's there for "documentation" purposes. For example `[A|_]=List` will extract first element of list into A and ignore rest of list. Underscore has some other uses too.
    - Sharlin 2y ago
      Yes, many languages use `_` as a placeholder name, and at least in Rust any name starting with `_` is considered intentionally unused.
      - hunter2_ 2y ago
        Aside: many IRC clients would auto-append _ when registering a nick if the desired nick was already registered. Why _? Who knows.
        Sharlin 2y ago
        Probably because it has no specific meaning and being almost whitespace is the easiest to mentally ignore out of the set of valid nickname characters. `-` is another candidate but a programmer used to C-like languages will likely intuitively pick `_` just because it’s valid in identifiers unlike `-`.
- ramesh31 2y ago
  >But why was _name the naming syntax for reserved keywords, specifically? As with so many things in software engineering, the answer comes down to "some programmer in the 70s working on a UNIX system had to make an arbitrary decision about something, and no one ever had a good reason to change it again."
- lazide 2y ago
  Most other characters you would use aren’t valid HTML, and originally you could say things like target=foo (no quotes) and it would work.
0x0 2y ago
Also worth noting that "_new" is NOT a reserved keyword, but it is sometimes mistakenly used instead of "_blank". Which can lead to funny behavior if you are visiting 2 or more sites making this mistake, as the links could then start opening in windows that were initially opened by the other site. Or least that's how it was back in the days of popup windows, before tabs and popup blockers became the norm.
- shkkmo 2y ago
  Not just weird behavior, but possible security issues. Browsers now automatically add a rel="noopener" to links that target _blank to prevent the opened site from gaining full access to your javascript object. Targeting _new does not do this unless you explicity add the rel="noopener" yourself. https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/4078 https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/4078 https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Attributes/rel/noopener https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Attributes...
  - cxr 2y ago
    Nobody gets "full access" to your "javascript object"—whatever that even means; pages from different origins will still run into exceptions when trying to diddle the opener. There is a small, well-known set of (safe) properties that are excluded from the restrictions—like location. But the noopener behavior, by making opener null, does stop other pages from setting even opener.location, which could ordinarily be used to programmatically send the user to another page.

dcminter 2y ago

I'm guessing it was possible before the window-opening behaviour came in (unless it was always there from the genesis of frameset), but it was assumed that the underscore prefixed version would be less likely to conflict with existing code than without. I'd be interested to hear either a citation proving or disproving that guess though.

Maken 2y ago

In other answer they link to the original specification [1], and it says that names must start with a letter, so anything preceded by "_" cannot be a frame name. [1] https://www.w3.org/TR/WD-frames-970331#frame https://www.w3.org/TR/WD-frames-970331#frame

stickfigure 2y ago
This one sentence is better than the original article.
- hbn 2y ago
  That sentence wouldn't have made sense to me before I read the original article. I got into web dev after HTML5, I've never heard of <frameset>
n_plus_1_acc 2y ago
Thanks

bazoom42 2y ago

Frame names must start with an alphanumerical character.