The Daily WTF

While browsing one day, Emma clicked a link on a site and nothing happened. That was annoying, but Emma wasn’t about to give up. She tried to get the URL out of the link, only to discover that there wasn’t a URL. Or a link. A quick trip to the DOM inspector highlighted what was going on:

<div id=”I32″ align=”left” onclick=”ItemClick(3,2)” onmouseout=”RollOut(3,2,false)” onmouseover=”RollOver(3,2,false)” style=”position: absolute; top: 43px; left: 1px; width: 176px; height: 16px; font: bold 8pt Arial; color: rgb(1, 35, 69); background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% rgb(255, 255, 255); padding: 2px; cursor: pointer; border: 0px solid rgb(255, 255, 255);”>Project Office</div>

This is an anti-pattern I thought had died circa 2006. Don’t reinvent hyperlinks in JavaScript. Here, we have a div with an onclick that triggers navigation- assuming the code works, which it didn’t in this case. But this isn’t the WTF, it’s just the appetizer.

Emma wasn’t about

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