Question

I’ve seen (and used) code to have a link spawn a javascript action many times in my life, but I’ve never come to a firm conclusion on if the href attribute should be blank or #. Do you have any preference one way or the other, and if so, why?

<a href='' onclick='javascript: DoSomething();'>linky</a> 

or

<a href='#' onclick='javascript: DoSomething();'>linky</a> 

Answer 1

You must have something for the href attribute, otherwise the browser will not treat it as a link (for example, making it focusable or giving it an underline) – that’s why the use of ‘#’ has become prevalent.

Also, the contents of the event attributes (onclick, onmouseover, on...) are already treated as javascript: you don’t need to preface it with javascript:

So given your example, the best way to do that inline (which itself is not the best way, probably), is like this:

<a href='#' onclick='DoSomething(); return false'>linky</a>