Thanks for those helpful suggestions, though I have batted around different ways of trying to get iWeb to register the "open in new window" when checked, to no avail so far, and it doesn't work with any link, whether in text or combined with an image. Taking all these points:
I have now managed to open the html using TextWrangler but I must admit it is a little beyond me to even find the string of code in question as iWeb uses so many files. It would be better if I could just get iWeb to do the work for me as it's meant to.
Strangely, when I open the website in iWeb the first time, all the pages to the left are marked in red before I've done anything! So I cannot use that as a simple check to see if a change has been made. Also I have already tried making other changes after checking the "open in new window" box before saving.
I always publish to a folder on my HD, as I am uploading to a server that is not me.com or mac.com. (Could that be the trouble? iWeb seems to generally be very unfriendly to publishing on other servers than Apple and I have had to jump through a lot of hoops with various things.)
Could it be the weird folder hierarchy created by iWeb, where there is an index.html page outside of the main folder where all the stuff is kept? So far, I have just uploaded it to the server "as is", so the contents of the main folder (which has another index.html rather strangely placed outside it) are not at the root level on the server. The folder containing them is at the root level and so is the "external" index.html. Would it work if I uploaded only the contents of the folder to the root directory on the server, and not in the folder that iWeb creates or with its "dummy" index.html outside it?
(I think in the past this has caused trouble with Google search sitemaps, and is the reason why in the end I uploaded the whole thing and not just the contents of the main folder.)
So to be clear (not that easy here), the files on the server are:
Directory > index.html plus the folder containing all the website files. So the actual website files are at a second level in a folder, not at the root level.
The easiest example where the blank target doesn't work is on the home page of one of my websites. Scroll down and there is an image of a book which has a link to a bookstore. This should open a new page in the browser, but never does. (Annoyingly, in FireFox it even kills the back button, Safari works slightly better in that respect.)
http://www.ordoastri.org/OA/Ordo_Astri.html
