4 ms·
> developers needed a way to explicitly tell the browser to open the link in a new tab, free of frame semantics First, it doesn't say why an underscore does th
by p4bl0 2y ago
> developers needed a way to explicitly tell the browser to open the link in a new tab, free of frame semantics
First, it doesn't say why an underscore does that, because you could totally have underscores in frame names. My guess as others here is that the underscore prefix dates back from reserved names in C and C++. IIRC the reserved names also included "_self" (even if it was the default), "_parent" (to go up a level in the frame hierarchy) and "_top" to replace the whole page.
Second, at the time it was clearly not "open the link in a new tab" but rather in a "new window". IE was the most used browser back then, by a large proportion, and it didn't supports tabs at all.
- systems_glitch 2y agoProbably the most likely explanation, given so many things do inherit idiosyncrasies from C. I'd always assumed it was from Perl, given its heavy use in CGI back then -- like $_ being the default var. But that would probably also eventually inherit from C :P
- JimDabell 2y ago> IE was the most used browser back then, by a large proportion, and it didn't supports tabs at all. Internet Explorer barely even existed back then, it certainly wasn’t the most used browser. That came later. No browser had tabs back in those days.
- p4bl0 2y agoI distinctly remember IE 5.x and 6.x on Windows and Mac OS with no tab support while Mozilla then Firefox (which had a much smaller users base) had them, at a period where HTML frames were still big.
- shkkmo 2y ago> because you could totally have underscores in frame names. Technically, the underscore was restricted and should not be used for user defined targets/frame names. This isn't something any browser I know of ever enforced. https://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/types.html#h-6.16 https://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/types.html#h-6.16