Is it okay to use an anchor tag without including the href attribute, and instead using a JavaScript click event handler? So I would omit the href completely, not even have it empty (href="").
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8 Answers
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In HTML5, using an a element without an href attribute is valid. It is considered to be a "placeholder hyperlink."
Example:
<a>previous</a>
Look for "placeholder hyperlink" on the w3c anchor tag reference page: https://www.w3.org/TR/2016/REC-html51-20161101/textlevel-semantics.html#the-a-element.
And it is also mentioned on the wiki here: https://www.w3.org/wiki/Elements/a
A placeholder link is for cases where you want to use an anchor element, but not have it navigate anywhere. This comes in handy for marking up the current page in a navigation menu or breadcrumb trail. (The old approach would have been to either use a span tag or an anchor tag with a class named "active" or "current" to style it and JavaScript to cancel navigation.)
A placeholder link is also useful in cases where you want to dynamically set the destination of the link via JavaScript at runtime. You simply set the value of the href attribute, and the anchor tag becomes clickable.
See also:
37
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It is OK, but at the same time can cause some browsers to become slow.
http://webdesignfan.com/yslow-tutorial-part-2-of-3-reducing-server-calls/
My advice is use <a href="#"></a>
If you're using JQuery remember to also use:
.click(function(event){
event.preventDefault();
// Click code here...
});
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24
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Short answer: No.
Long answer:
First, without an href attribute, it will not be a link. If it isn't a link then it wont be keyboard (or breath switch, or various other not pointer based input device) accessible (unless you use HTML 5 features of tabindex which are not universally supported). It is very rare that it is appropriate for a control to not have keyboard access.
Second. You should have an alternative for when the JavaScript does not run (because it was slow to load from the server, an Internet connection was dropped (e.g. mobile signal on a moving train), JS is turned off, etc, etc).
Make use of progressive enhancement by unobtrusive JS.
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The tag is fine to use without an href attribute. Contrary to many of the answers here, there are actually standard reasons for creating an anchor when there is no href. Semantically, "a" means an anchor or a link. If you use it for anything following that meaning, then you are fine.
One standard use of the a tag without an href is to create named links. This allows you to use an anchor with name=blah and later on you can create an anchor with href=#blah to link to the named section of the current page. However, this has been deprecated because you can also use IDs in the same manner. As an example, you could use a header tag with id=header and later you could have an anchor pointing to href=#header.
My point, however, is not to suggest using the name property. Only to provide one use case where you don't need an href, and therefore reasoning why it is not required.
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In some browsers you will face problems if you are not giving an href attribute. I suggest you to write your code something like this:
<a href="#" onclick="yourcode();return false;">Link</a>
you can replace yourcode() with your own function or logic,but do remember to add return false; statement at the end.
<span>elements most certainly can be navigated via the keyboard. You could also make it so that<a>elements are not navigable via keyboard. – zzzzBov