Home/ Questions/Q 6096613
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-23T12:56:55+00:00

In the project I work on I’ve recently moved from developing backend (i.e. non-web)

  • 0

In the project I work on I’ve recently moved from developing backend (i.e. non-web) servers to web-related things. In the HTML code I’ve found the following thing all over the place:

<a href='#'>some link</a>

Then some JS is attached to the click event of <a> element.

Does this sole hash has any special meaning? I understand how the href='#some_id' tells the browser to scroll to element with ID = some_id. But href='#' doesn’t work that way, right?
If it’s all about creating a clickable piece of text, why not simply use a <span>?

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Exactly. What you see here is somehow bad design (although it is quite common to use href="#").

    What it actually will do is jumping to the top of the page if the default action is not prevented.

    Much better would be to

    • use a <button> and style it accordingly (maybe even only inserted via JavaScript)
    • or let the link point to some real resource (that triggers some action on the server side) and attach the JavaScript event handler to do this (or similar) action on the client and prevent following the link (keyword: unobtrusive JavaScript).

    It also depends on whether the site is meant to run with disabled JavaScript. If yes, then such a link (but also a button) will not work.

    But in any case, from a semantic point of view, using a link solely to have something “clickable” is wrong.

    • 0