Is href required on links? [duplicate]

Answer 1

I'm not sure, but some time ago I had a problems with "a" without href...the clicks just didn't work. But maybe it was just an old browser.

Answer 2

While it's not required, you should add the href to the anchor tags, because, well without an href they're not really anchor tags.

You can add a '#' to the link and add a onClick='return false;' to prevent the click event. If you're using JQuery, you can add event.preventDefault() to your click handler for your links.

From an SEO perspective, I'd go with using titles for the anchor tags (avoid the -ve text-indent property.)

Answer 3

They're not absolutely required, however you should probably put href="#/" as the href to make it semantically correct. Without an href="" attribute, the anchor is likely to be parsed as a bookmark in the page, especially if the name="" attribute is specified.

Answer 4

According to the specs it is, and also you'll find browsers implement different default styling (e.g. not changing the cursor to pointer) when you leave out href. The most common approaches to adding dummy hrefs are

href="#" // But the event handler function must return false in order to avoid the default behaviour of jumping to the top of the page

href="javascript:void()" // has the advantage of having no annoying default behaviour

Answer 5

no it's not. But links may render different (underline and color) if the href is not set.

Answer 6

I am assuming that by "links" you simply mean a elements. If that's true then:

No. At least, not in the HTML5 draft specification:

If the a element has no href attribute, then the element represents a placeholder for where a link might otherwise have been placed, if it had been relevant.

From the HTML 4.01 specification:

Authors may also create an A element that specifies no anchors, i.e., that doesn't specify href, name, or id. Values for these attributes may be set at a later time through scripts.