4 ms·

So again as I understand, it's simply because a standard was decided ? > The (reserved) name “_blank” was then defined to have that semantic. I guess I was ho

So again as I understand, it's simply because a standard was decided ? > The (reserved) name “_blank” was then defined to have that semantic. I guess I was hoping for some interesting quirk with older browsers or something.

layer8 2y ago
It was to avoid the situation of someone naming a frame “blank” without being aware of it having special semantics, or (I’m not completely clear on the history) avoiding breaking compatibility with existing use. That’s much more unlikely with a name like “_blank”. It’s common practice to separate out names with special semantics from general-use names in a syntactic way like that. There’s also “_self”, “_parent”, and “_top”. It’s an extensible scheme where HTML can add further names with special semantics in that reserved name space. I now agree that the article doesn’t make a particularly good job in explaining all of this.