target="_blank" has always been the prefered method, and I would stick with that.
XHTML is gr8 b/c it's easy to format via CSS, and a whole lot cleaner than unstandard tags that wind up in web pages.
I never trust "Wussy"-wig editors to produce efficient code. I still use Notepad (Quanta prefferably while in Linux, which is most of the time).
Hand coding is the only way to go. Thank god for text editors.