Oh god, this is frustrating. So I spent time making sure every element on my blog validated to XHTML strict when I realized the property “target” is removed from the anchor tag in strict.
I mean come on. What’s the plan behind this? Does the consortium plan to enforce “rel” tags that spawn windows?
The workaround to use a rel tag and replace it with javascript feels utterly retarded to me, it’s such a turnoff 
I swapped to transitional for now, but I’d be happy if anyone had a decent alternative for target _blank in strict mode that doesn’t force you to implement a javascript loop for anchors.
Thanks 
We have to do this a lot. So much in fact that the WYSIWYG we use in our CMS (fckeditor) we had to revamp the way it allows you to create links to accommodate for it, so instead of it applying target="_blank" we have it doing rel=“external”.
On the front-end we use jquery to execute it external links into a new window/tab, and it works quite brilliantly.
$("a[@rel='external']").click(function(){return !window.open($(this).attr("href"));});
Hey, thanks both for the reply. Yes, I know about both those methods.
I’m curious however if this is something that is really intended? To have to go through javascript parsing instead of spawning a window through regular xhtml just I dunno… sounds odd to me. Whereas I realize “target” got deprecated because of marquee and frames, it just seems like such a convenient tag for anchors.
Especially when methods like jQuery add 100kb to download : )
**
EDIT: Turns out (as simplistik called out in another thread) that there are smaller versions of Jquery to download (from 30kb and upwards)**
I’m sure something will come to replace it though… Thanks for the replies 
