Regarding opening links in new tabs, the behavior I adopted for various sites I run (including
http://kirklandhistory.org/) is: If the page is on the same site, replace current page. If the link is to a supporting document or some other site, open a new tab.
Since browsers now all have a simple method for the user to force something to open in a new tab, I thought it best to not make that the default behavior for all links, given the original vision for hypertext systems like the web.