Is an anchor tag without the href attribute safe?
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="").
Answer
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: