So basically It’s an “_blank” because it is.. Author’s description is, “because if it wasn’t _blank.. it wouldn’t open a new tab.” Reminds me of some university professors I had.
Because you could "NameAFrameAnyThingYouWanTED" they made some magic targets, _blank window to open a blank window (we have tabs, then we did not), _self to open in the same frame or window, _parent to open in the parent frame, _top to break out of frames entirely (this is how you would bypass the ad some free .coms would inject into your site)
When I read the html spec in the 90s all it says was you can name a frame anything except don't use _ as _ is reserved for special frame types.
Originally, _blank, _new, etc. weren’t special. A target ref to a name which wasn’t used would open a new window. If it was already used, it would take you to that open window.
People started using _whatever because just ‘blank’ would almost always cause a collision. Eventually it got standardized that it would always open a new blank window.
In anglefire and maybe geocities we would serve the document with a .txt extension and it would also skip the ads but browsers, with their liberal acceptance policy, would render normally.
> 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.
I now agree that the article doesn’t make a particularly good job in explaining all of this.
The primary thing the article does is explain that there are normal targets in the first place, which is probably the main aspect people might otherwise be missing.
For anyone who writes these, please just leave it blank and revisit it later