*sigh*

My attempts at subtle nuances of connotation were clearly too subtle. No, this is not meant to be taken as "questioning your ability to read for comprehension" or any of those wonderful (?) phrases that serve to keep quality flame wars warm and toasty.

"broken" makes a clear statment that something is, well, broken, and (implicitly) should be fixed. "b0rken" was meant to convey the sense that, while I think there is something very wrong with the matter, I recognize that my view is (almost certainly) not universally held, and may, in fact, be a distinctly minority view.

On "abusive web coding"...

Just because something is legal by the relevant standards has no necessary bearing on whether or not it is abusive. I suspect that the hell of popup windows makes an instructive example. In the instant matter, I have yet to see, here or elsewhere, reasoned and convincing argument for *why* setting the target attribute to _blank is valuable. I have seen explanation of how it is a useful attribute in a framed setting.

When a practice has the recommended behavior of a construct is to cause the appearance of a new window, that has consequences on my computer that I wish to be able to control. To compare it to animated GIFs is fatuous. As a reducto ad absurdum argument, it doesn't wash. That I have been able to use feedback from this discussion to adjust the configuration of my browser to mitigate this behavior does not make the attempt to exercise it less egregious.

From the early days of the WWW, there has always been tension between people who felt it necessary to show that they knew how to work at the edges by putting up web pages and sites that presented truly obnoxious visions and viewers who rightly felt that they were the ones who should have considerable control over just what appeared on their screens. Some of us try to choose our browsers to maximize our control over the things web so-called designers try to inflict on us.

You cast the choice of browser as between picking one that behaves as I wish versus one that doesn't. I wish it were that simple. It isn't, and to then assert that my choice (involving tradeoffs) makes me at fault for the effects of the shortcomings of the choice I did make is so much baloney.

I have no expectation at this point that the target attribute will be removed from the list of acceptable attributes for the a tag. So be it. I floated the question, and it did not garner the sort of support I'd expect to see to cause it to be considered for implementation.