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Comment by KoenDG | Hacker News Reader

Hard disagree on the first point.

Anchors are perfectly fine for jumping to a specific point on a page. Nearly all documentation websites do it, wikipedia does it, etc...

It's literally in the texts from back in 1995: https://www.w3.org/MarkUp/1995-archive/Elements/A.html

"This allows for the form HREF="#identifier" to refer to another anchor in the same document."

As Linus Torvalds says with Linux: don't break userspace. If userspace has made something work, don't break that.

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> Hard disagree on the first point.

> Anchors are perfectly fine for jumping to a specific point on a page. Nearly all documentation websites do it, wikipedia does it, etc...

I don't think that point says to not use anchors for in-page navigation.

They're not objecting to `href="#my_anchor"`, they're objecting to `href="#" onclick="doStuff()"`, which is increasingly common on the web today.

incidentally if you must do this, it's better to use href="javascript:;" rather than href="#" because it won't cause jumps in position for noscript users/when scripts break

href="javascript:;" is also bad. It doesn't work if you try to open it in a new tab. Just use a real url!

There isn't a situation where you must do this. Don't do this.

Quick heuristic: if you have a clickable link and I can't open it in a new tab, you should be using a button instead.

href="javascript:..." is just as bad. I want to hover over a link and see where it goes before I click. That makes navigation fair to the user, as opposed to "guess what's behind door number 3"

Those are a same-page links and they are perfectly okay when pointing to an identificator on the same page. However, people put no identificator after the "#" and attach a listener instead where the behavior turns undefined and everything is possible.

I think the author was talking about a literal "href='#'" which ought to have no use aside from a poor man's "back to the top", rather than an anchor pointing to another id on the page, which can be useful.

The first point is that anchor elements should not be used as buttons by adding event listeners that don’t do something akin to following a link. It isn’t really related to the usage you are describing.

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