There's an outdated note in the documentation (
http://htmlpurifier.org/docs#toclink6) that says "The target attribute has been deprecated for a long time".
This is
INCORRECT. The target attribute was deprecated in HTML 4 strict, but this was
REVERSED in HTML 5. It is now officially a perfectly valid, useful, and legal attribute.
If any of the documentation maintainers are reading this, please take note.
As noted elsewhere, the work-around to allow the target attribute is:
$config->set('Attr.AllowedFrameTargets', ['_blank']);