Overview and original question
window.name is an interesting beast. MDN's description hints at the original intent:
The name of the window is used primarily for setting targets for hyperlinks and forms. Windows do not need to have names.
So, this means we can open the console in this window, and write:
var win = window.open('http://google.com', 'el goog');
...and then let it through the popup blocker, that should open google.com in a window named "el goog." I can't access the name property of win because of the same-origin policy, but if I open a console in the new window and type name, I'll get "el goog".
If I send the window back to the domain I opened it from (in this case stackoverflow.com), I can get the name property, and it hasn't changed.
win.location.replace(location.href);
win.name; // "el goog"
This means we can have a kind of cross-domain session store by setting the name property of a window.
If google.com had changed the value of window.name before the window was sent back to the original domain, we'd see the new value instead of "el goog." This could be used as a cross-domain data transport, similar in utility to JSONP or CORS.
I did a bit of searching to try to find more info, and apparently dojo thinks it's legit as a transport. Somehow, though, that doesn't completely reassure me. So my question is, are any reputable sites using window.name as a data transport? I'd think it would be easily spotted, because their docs would say something like "add 'callback' to the