I'm responding to portions of this out-of-order. Hope you don't mind...

"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.

Yes, well, as far as I am concerned, you needn't try to convey that. I give everyone the benefit of the doubt and assume that they know their views aren't universally held right up until they show they are so naive as to think otherwise. You don't strike me as naive, Michael.

You do strike me as sort of a crotchety luddite. That's a compliment. I strike myself the same way.

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.

I'm very aware of the tension that built up as a result of people wishing to control presentation instead of relying on browsers to do it acceptably for them. (And the people on the other side of the fence that wished their browser would give them a way to turn off blink tags.) I started my career using Mosaic (v1.0 on SunOS) right around the time when NCSA's HTTPd v1.0 (with CGI!) came out. Fortunately, these days, that tension is mostly gone thanks to the slow but steady removal of presentation-only elements from HTML and the adoption of CSS. (The one big hump that has yet to be gotten over is table-based layouts; everything else is relative cake.)

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.

Here's one: I like it. I wish all external links on perlmonks had target="_blank". That would save me from needing to control click on external links. That said, I don't really like that the only convenient way to provide that functionality now is to co-op the HTML spec's target attribute. I'd rather that there were a convenient way to indicate that a link is "external" to the current site. As a "site" might span domains, an explicit hint is really needed for this. I also think a link's "externality" is an inherent property of the link which should be able to affect more than presentation, so homebrewed CSS solutions don't seem to be the right approach. An external attribute which could assume values yes or no would probably be sufficient. Unfortunately, the spec doesn't provide that so we've got to make do with what we have.

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.

The only reason it "doesn't wash" in your opinion is because you don't feel the same way about animated GIFs as you do about new windows. I, on the other hand, find them severely irritating. If you felt the way I do about animated GIFs, you might decide that comparing them to new windows was fatuous for the same reasons you find the converse fatuous now. I'm pointing out here that it's all a matter of opinion. I have yet to see you even try to provide an argument that would convince me that new windows are somehow inherently worse than animated GIFs. Why should I accept that a priori?

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.

It isn't baloney. It's just the way it is. What you fail to appreciate about my stance on this is that it is purely pragmatic. Petitioning one website to change isn't a scalable solution. Choosing a browser that provides the behavior you want is. Requesting your chosen browser's developers to add that feature is. Getting the spec changed is. When there are tons of people that feel the same way you do, and they all start boycotting sites because of this issue, well, then socially driven change might happen. But, I don't think you'll ever see that kind of across-the-board support on this issue. Like I said, I like target="_blank" and there are others like me. This isn't the blink tag we are talking about. Almost everyone hated that. ;-)

-sauoq
"My two cents aren't worth a dime.";