Placeholder links (e.g. <a>...</a>) shouldn't be styled as hyperlinks.
Created by: EricDunsworth
I've noticed that Bootstrap's default CSS currently styles all a elements as hyperlinks (blue text color, underlining on mouse hover, etc...). Wouldn't it make more sense to only style a elements that contain href attributes in that way?
The HTML 5.1 spec's definition of the a element states that only a elements that use href attributes are considered to be hyperlinks. a elements that lack href are classified as placeholder links and are supposed to only consist of that element's content. In other words, by default, placeholder links are meant to look like normal text without any special styling.
From what I can tell, all modern browsers' built-in style sheets render placeholder links as normal text and only add colouring/underlining if an href attribute is used. Bootstrap 3 and 4 are currently overriding that behaviour.
JS Bin examples: