I ran into a ‘bug’ in jQuery that only occurs in IE and under specific circumstances. Actually, it’s not really a bug in jQuery… it’s more a funky “feature” of our beloved* browser: Internet Explorer. (* yeah right, muaha 
)
In jQuery you can easily get the href attribute value off of a link by doing $("mylink").attr("href"); but sometimes in IE this isn’t reliable. For example: normally, if the href value is “#myAnchor”, jQuery will return —surprise, surprise— the string: “#myAnchor”. But in some cases with IE, you’ll get the full URL path of the page you’re currently on, with the anchor string value appended to it (for example: “http://labs.thesedays.com/#myAnchor”).
This bug is specifically annoying when you use the href value in a selector in jQuery. For example, you should never do the following, because it may result in unexpected results when browsing in IE: $("a[href='#myAnchor']").click(...);
Workaround? Instead of using the href attribute, you could use the rel or xref attributes of a link, but these attributes aren’t supposed to be used for this purpose and if you disable javascript, the anchors won’t work anymore.
The jQuery devs should fix this issue ASAP, because I think that issues like these are the main reason why people use javascript libraries like jQuery: they make hacky javascript work!
For me, this proves once again that Internet Explorer totally fails at DOM management.
Maybe the safest way would be to use a selector that matches hrefs that end with your anchor name… $(“a[href$=#myAnchor]“).click(…);
Don’t you think?
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This post was mentioned on Twitter by bramus: @jeresig Any chance you could land a fix/workaround for http://bit.ly/7I3IXm in the upcoming #jquery release?…
@marin that’s a great temporary solution, but I think jQuery should “fix” it anyway