oast: depends on which XHTML spec you're aiming for. My site is completely XHTML 1.0 Transitional compliant (
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=www.adultpicweb.com) and target="_blank" works for me with IE7, Firefox, and Opera. Maybe the doctype you're trying to aim for is Strict which discontinued the target property? Also, if you're trying to use unicode (8 or 16 bit) that opens another bag of nightmares as those wonderful things like & and other tags are invalid. I went with iso-8859-1 for a reason: php provides a function to do the necessary character encoding in urls (htmlspecialchars).