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Only 4.13% of the Web Is Standards-Compliant
Death Metal writes "Browser maker Opera has published the early results of an ongoing study that aims to provide insight into the structure of Internet content. To conduct this research project, Opera created the Metadata Analysis and Mining Application (MAMA), a tool that crawls the web and indexes the markup and scripting data from approximately 3.5 million pages."
./ is mostly text, but how did you post this comment? Any Page refreshes?
Actually it uses some pretty sweet AJAX calls.
Progress usually comes from ignoring standards.
XHTML-STRICT is not for everyone, it's intended for those (like me) who are more development oriented and wish to completely separate structure from presentation. A "target" attribute is clearly a presentation attribute since it defines how the linked reference is presented to the user and as the parent noted, it should be up to the user to make that choice.
When wanting to control presentation in XHTML STRICT, you should use DOM or CSS, that way, they structure (XHTML) is removed from the presentation (JS/CSS). I typically link all scripts and stylesheets. That way the XHTML is made portable in terms of data with the JS/CSS being limited to only effecting a web client. In the OPs case, a simple ID attribute for that particular anchor would work just fine, you could bind an event listener for a click event to that element and then execute your javascript popup code when that event is triggered, canceling the event so that the browser does execute the link on it's own. That way, your default browser clients could execute the JS instructions, while a 3rd party app (an AIR desktop or mobile device) could put their own custom behavior in if desired.
While that sort of practice may seem extreme to a designer, as a developer I can swear to it's scalability and transportability for supporting 3rd party access such as when developing a web UI that needs to support many types of clients via one codebase.
If none of those features make sense nor strike you as worthwhile, I suggest you stick to XHTML TRANSITIONAL, which is probably better suited to your needs.