Most site owners don't want their visitors to leave their site, so when linking to external sites most prefer to open a new window.

Anyways if anyone wants to remove the "_blank" think all they need to do is edit the source and thats fine by us. It was more of a convenience factor for the masses that a rule that had to be followed.

And if you are as good as you say you are in CSS why don't you have a look at our homepage in IE7 and tell me why it is that the footer wants to float over the text about 3/4 of the way up in that silly browser