href javascript vs href javascript void 0

Question

Our web app is rendered totally on the browser The server only talks to the browser through JSON messaging   As a result  we only need a single page for the app and mostly all the  lt a gt  tags do not have a real href pointing to other pages   In my quest of removing unnecessary things I was wondering if I can get rid of the zillions of void 0  we have in our code  as they seem useless    lt a onclick  fn    gt Does not appear as a link  because there s no href lt  a gt   lt a href  javascript void 0   onclick  fn    gt fn is called lt  a gt   lt a href  javascript   onclick  fn    gt fn is called too  lt  a gt    Does anybody knows if using href  javascript   can cause a problem  It works even on IE7     Please don t spend your valuable time to tell me inline javascript is bad  as this is generated by a template engine

User · Answer

Using  javascript void 0  will do cause problem in IE  when you click the link  it will trigger onbeforeunload event of window     lt  doctype html gt   lt html gt   lt head gt   lt  head gt   lt body gt   lt a href  javascript void 0     gt Click me  lt  a gt   lt script gt  window onbeforeunload   function         alert   oops          lt  script gt   lt  body gt   lt  html gt

User · Answer

javascript void 0   --  this executes void function and returns undefined  This could have issues with IE  javascript   --  this does nothing  safest to create dead links      --  this means pointing to same DOM  it will reload the page on click

User · Answer

Why have all the click events as a href links   If instead you use span tags with  hover CSS and the appropriate onclick events  this will get around the issue completely

User · Answer

I usually do not use any href and change the aspect with css  making them seems link  Thus you do not have to worry about link effect at all  except for the event handler of your application  a     text-recoration  underline    cursor  pointer

User · Answer

you could make them all   s   You would then need to add return false  to the end of any function that is called onclick of the anchor to not have the page jump up to the top

User · Answer

When using javascript  in navigation the return value of the executed script  if there is one  becomes the content of a new document which is displayed in the browser   The void operator in JavaScript causes the return value of the expression following it to return undefined  which prevents this action from happening   You can try it yourself  copy the following into the address bar and press return   javascript  hello    The result is a new page with only the word  hello    Now change it to   javascript void  hello       nothing happens   When you write javascript  on its own there s no script being executed  so the result of that script execution is also undefined  so the browser does nothing  This makes the following more or less equivalent   javascript undefined  javascript void 0  javascript    With the exception that undefined can be overridden by declaring a variable with the same name   Use of void 0 is generally pointless  and it s basically been whittled down from void functionThatReturnsSomething      As others have mentioned  it s better still to use return false  in the click handler than use the javascript  protocol

User · Answer

This method seems ok in all browsers  if you set the onclick with a jQuery event    lt a href  javascript    gt Click me  lt  a gt    As said before  href     with change the url hash and can trigger data re load if you use a History  or ba-bbq  JS plugin

User · Answer

It does not cause problems but it s a trick to do the same as PreventDefault  when you re way down in the page and an anchor as    lt a href     onclick  fn    gt click here lt  a gt    you will jump to the top and the URL will have the anchor   as well  to avoid this we simply return false  or use javascript void 0    regarding your examples   lt a onclick  fn    gt Does not appear as a link  because there s no href lt  a gt    just do a  text-decoration underline   and you will have  link a-like    lt a href  javascript void 0   onclick  fn    gt fn is called lt  a gt   lt a href  javascript   onclick  fn    gt fn is called too  lt  a gt    it s ok  but in your function at the end  just return false  to prevent the default behavior  you don t need to do anything more

[javascript] href="javascript:" vs. href="javascript:void(0)"

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