How to define link targets with _target in HTML

With _target link targets are defined in HTML. Although target _blank in HTML provides the option of opening hy­per­links in a new window, this option is also viewed crit­ic­ally. The default setting _self, on the other hand, causes visitors to leave the current website.

For dealing with hy­per­links on your website, the HTML attribute target is an important tool. Namely, with this attribute you create the target window of a link. If a visitor clicks on a link on your website, the new page will open in the current tab or window by default. If you don’t want this, you can use _target to specify that the link should open in a new tab or on a second page. This has the advantage that visitors stay on your online presence longer and do not leave it for another website.

However, there is also criticism of this practice. If visitors to your website have not made any other settings, you are in­ter­fer­ing with their user behaviour and opening a new page or tab without them re­quest­ing it. For this reason, this option was tem­por­ar­ily not allowed and returned only in HTML 5. It is now re­com­men­ded that you use the cor­res­pond­ing command in HTML called target _blank only when leaving your page would result in data loss. Thus, the command is for the benefit of users. You will learn how _target works later in this text.

The HTML attribute target is usually enclosed in the HTML tag and must contain a fixed value. Other allowed elements for _target are area, base and form. When written out, it looks like this, for example:

_target may contain the following values:

_Target is placed inside an element. It looks like this in the code:

_self is set as default. If you want to set the value manually, this is the code:

target _blank in HTML makes the link open in a new window or tab. If you use this value, you should add rel="noopener" for security reasons. Although this is not a must from a technical point of view, it is highly re­com­men­ded, as it prevents the linked page from po­ten­tially accessing usage data. In the code it looks like this:

Now the cor­res­pond­ing link will open in a new tab.

If you have precisely defined the name of a window in your frameset, you can also have the page open in it. If this option does not work because the name does not exist, a new tab will be opened auto­mat­ic­ally as in the HTML target _blank variant.