[Zopieux]

Oh God, this goes exactly against what we've been trying to exterminate for the last 10 years.

target="_blank" is one of the worst thing of the old web. Frames may be the first in this ranking. Surprisingly enough, the two are related: the 'target' attribute primary goal is to manage frames.

As others said, as the whole web developer community says actually, one shouldn't use such thing that forces the users to open a new tab. You should give them the freedom of choosing whether they want to open this new tab, because it's very easy for them to do so: middle-clicking or ctrl-clicking.

Please do some basic web searching; you'll find pretty soon that people have been fighting against this attribute for too long to let a techy-oriented website like HN implement this.