Ever wondered why you need the underscore in target="_blank" to open a link in
a new tab?
Before HTML5, developers used
<frameset>
for SPA-like functionality, dividing the window into multiple frames, each with
its own unique ID. For example, the left frame might be id="sidebar", and the
right frame could be id="content".
When clicking a link, the browser needed to know which frame to load the content into. That’s where the target attribute came in. Clicking a link in the sidebar, for example, would load the content in the content frame:
<a href="/pricing" target="content"></a>
Now, if you had a frame named “blank” and used <a href="/" target="blank">,
the content would load in that frame. But if no such frame existed, the browser
would create a new tab and assign it the “blank” name. Clicking the same link
again wouldn’t open another tab.
So why the underscore in target="_blank"?
It’s simple - developers needed a way to explicitly tell the browser to open the link in a new tab, free of frame semantics. The underscore signifies a special value rather than a frame name.
P.S. Don’t use <frameset>. It’s deprecated in HTML5.