open link in new tab with github markdown using target="_blank"

Question

Is there a way to let a Link, written in githubs markdown, open in a new tab? All posts I have found related to this suggests to use HTML and target="_blank", which is fine with me, but that doesn't work. For example this link:

<a href="http://stackoverflow.com" target="_blank">Go</a>

Does not open in a new tab. I'm no interested in replies for all kind of different markdown syntaxes, but only in a solution that will work when I write my markdown on github.

Answer 1

Well it seems that the simple answer is "It's not possible". Github does not include the target attribute even if you use plain HTML, so it's not a in the final HTML Anchor tag. Annoying, but OK, users can just do a CTRL+click (on Windows and Linux) or CMD+click (on MacOS) on the link, the get the same behavior.

Answer 2

There is a solution specific to websites using GitHub pages: adding line

markdown: kramdown

to file _config.yml, you can use [go](http://stackoverflow.com){:target="_blank" rel="noopener"} because then GitHub pages engine uses another markdown called kramdown for generating html. However, it does not work on previews and in markdown rendered by GitHub directly in the project repository.