[whatwg] Reserved browsing context names

Ian Hickson ian at hixie.ch
Fri Feb 11 14:12:11 PST 2011


On Sun, 14 Nov 2010, Boris Zbarsky wrote:
>
> I was just looking at 
> http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/browsers.html#the-rules-for-choosing-a-browsing-context-given-a-browsing-context-name 
> and I noticed that there are some other magical (starting with '_') 
> browsing context "names" that Gecko, at least supports.
> 
> These are "_content" and "_main"; they target the main browser rendering 
> area. I believe at least _main is supported in IE as well, or was at 
> some point according to the Gecko code comments (we added _main for IE 
> compat).  These are useful for UAs that allow a non-main rendering area 
> (e.g. a sidebar) to allow links in it to trigger the main rendering 
> area.
> 
> I think it would be good to add one or both of these to the spec.

I tried testing this but I couldn't actually find a modern browser where 
there was a way to put content into a sidebar, so I'm not sure how to 
test it.

We do spec rel=sidebar, which in theory lets make a link open in an 
auxiliary browsing context, so it would make some sense to have a feature 
to target back, if there is a browser that lets you use auxiliary browsing 
contexts still. Is there?

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


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