External links, xhtml standards, reporting header info?

[conspireagainst]

I'm in a bit of a quandry.

Since XHTML strict does not allow the use of the attribute target="_whatev er" inside anchor tags (since HTML 4), most web standards professionals advocate the use of either a simple, or complicated, depending on the situation, Javascript function that is an event handler.

Now, this event handler that forces new windows onclick by using the function window.open() has one main issue that I can see:

It does not report the entire header information to the page that the user clicks to.

A lot of people wouldn't have a problem with this, but I do, since it negates statistical methods of gathering information on where the user came from - so the website that receives the click from our website will not know that the user came from our domain.

The main question: Is there any way around this issue? Both to not use the target attribute, and to also report the headers (either via Javascript or other method)?

[iam_clint]

one way to make sure that your site opened it and not someone elses check the document.parent .location.href when the page loads or get the referrer.

[conspireagainst]

one way to make sure that your site opened it and not someone elses check the document.parent .location.href when the page loads or get the referrer.

Right, however, the referrals are being sent [from our site] by DOM-compatible browsers like FF and others, but IE most of the time is not reporting headers [from our site to the external link] sent via JavaScript's window.open() function.

Is there a way to get window.open() to always send the header, or is this solely reliant upon the browser and cannot be controlled?

Basically, I need a sure-fire, 100% method of sending referral headers from my site when a user clicks an off-site link (but not using target="_blank" )