Is an anchor tag without the href attribute safe

Question

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

User · Answer

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.

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

If you have to use href for backwards compability  you can also use   lt a href  javascript void 0   gt link lt  a gt    instead of    if you don t want to use the attribute

User · Answer

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  lt a href     gt  lt  a gt   If you re using JQuery remember to also use    click function event       event preventDefault           Click code here

User · Answer

In HTML5  using an a element without an href attribute is valid  It is considered to be a  placeholder hyperlink     Example    lt a gt previous lt  a gt    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     https   stackoverflow com a 10510353 19112 http   www html5in24hours com 2012 06 8-ways-to-get-started-with-html5-today  http   webdesign about com od html5tutorials qt html5-placeholder-links htm

User · Answer

The  lt a gt  tag without the  href  can be handy when using multi-level menus and you need to expand the next level but don t want that menu label to be an active link  I have never had any issues using it that way

User · Answer

From an accessibility perspective  lt a gt  without a href is not tab-able  all links should be tab-able so add a tabindex  0  if you don t have a href

User · Answer

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    lt a href     onclick  yourcode   return false   gt Link lt  a gt    you can replace yourcode   with your own function or logic but do remember to add return false  statement at the end

[html] Is an anchor tag without the href attribute safe?

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