[whatwg] Should target '_search' be taken as part of HTML 5 spec?

Ian Hickson ian at hixie.ch
Tue Jul 28 17:12:34 PDT 2009


On Tue, 14 Jul 2009, Honza Bambas wrote:
>
> Target '_search' makes a link open in a sidebar (Opera) or sidebar-like 
> window (IE). For some offline web apps would be cool to open sidebar by 
> just one click. In other browsers (Firefox) web content could be open in 
> a sidebar only by creating a bookmark, marking it as to open in a 
> sidebar, use (click) that bookmark.
> 
> So, there are tendencies and voices to open web content in a sidebar in 
> all browsers but it is not taken as a standard. I would really like this 
> feature to be available in all browsers.

HTML5 supports this use case using rel=sidebar.


On Tue, 14 Jul 2009, Gavin Sharp wrote:
> 
> Firefox used to have this behavior, but it was accidentally broken prior 
> to 3.0 (opened a new tab instead). We then removed it in 3.0.2 because 
> only one person had noticed the change in behavior, and it didn't seem 
> worth the code complexity or maintenance cost.
> 
> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=438526 has more details. 
> Comment 7 in that bug implies that IE 7 only supports if you enable a 
> non-default preference option.

I haven't added target=_search since it does not seem browser vendors want 
to implement it.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'


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