HTML - alternate element for explicit links?

<a> without href? If I want a link's text to equal its target, is there no way to declare it without duplicating the target URL in the source?

in other words: does a shorter version of this exist?

<a href="http://www.domain.com/page.html">http://www.domain.com/page.html</a>

this does not work:

<a>http://www.domain.com/page.html</a>

开发者_运维百科

is there no element for this purpose?

---

You are correct, a click-able anchor always needs a hyperlink reference.

As an aside, you could use javascript and short-hand it, but you're adding a dependency to the visitor now.

var links = document.getElementsByTagName('a');
for (var l = 0; l < links.length; l++){
  if (links[l].innerHTML.indexOf('http') == 0 && !links[l].href)
    links[l].href = links[l].innerHTML;
}

Very Primitive, but works.

---

No. It definitely needs a href attribute.

---

Not with plain HTML. It is possible with JavaScript, although I don't recommend it since crawlers wouldn't be able to follow the link and that would be just lazy.

---

is there no tag for this purpose?

no

---

You can always define it as below and then use some Javascript to do the rest.

<a href="#">http://www.domain.com/page.html</a>

An anchor tag needs a href, it's just how it is. If you don't want to use a href, do:

<span class="mockAnchor">http://www.domain.com/page.html</span>

And have your own CSS for that to make it look like an anchor (and add a click event etc.)