Ask HN: How do we get Google and Twitter to use href attributes again?

20 points

5 years ago

I keep finding new places where Google and Twitter use <button> elements or <a> elements with an onclick handler instead of an href attribute; see this example on a search result page:

    https://i.imgur.com/MjyoyJr.png

and this example on Google Maps:

    https://twitter.com/beaugunderson/status/1428011803179507715

and this example on Twitter's trending topics:

    https://twitter.com/beaugunderson/status/1428441375444377601

There are probably many reasons to care about this but mine is that I want to cmd-click more than one result at a time to open them in tabs and I can't do that if they don't have hrefs.

While I don't use a screen reader it seems like a worse experience because of this if one does:

    https://a11y-101.com/design/button-vs-link
    https://naga.co.za/2020/03/13/links-vs-buttons/

It's become a truism that Google only fixes things when they appear on HN and whichever PM is responsible notices them; here's hoping that happens here.

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