Should the HTML Anchor Tag Honor the Disabled Attribute?

Question

If I create an HTML anchor tag and set the disabled attribute to true, I get different behaviors in different browsers (surprise! surprise!).

I created a fiddle to demonstrate.

In IE9, the link is grayed out and does not transfer to the HREF location. In Chrome/FF/Safari, the link is the normal color and will transfer to the HREF location.

What should the correct behavior be? Is IE9 rendering this incorrectly and I should implement some CSS and javascript to fix it; or is Chrome/FF/Safari not correct and will eventually catch up?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I had to fix this behavior in a site with a lot of anchors that were being enabled/disabled with this attribute according to other conditions, etc. Maybe not ideal, but in a situation like that, if you prefer not to fix each anchor's code individually, this will do the trick for all the anchors:

$('a').each(function () {
    $(this).click(function (e) {
        if ($(this).attr('disabled')) {
            e.preventDefault();
            e.stopImmediatePropagation();
        }
    });
    var events = $._data ? $._data(this, 'events') : $(this).data('events');
    events.click.splice(0, 0, events.click.pop());
});

And:

a[disabled] {
    color: gray;
    text-decoration: none;
}