For one thing, because then someone trying to use your page with a keyboard instead of a mouse is screwed: anchors without href don't tend to be focusable by ke

For one thing, because then someone trying to use your page with a keyboard instead of a mouse is screwed: anchors without href don't tend to be focusable by keyboard action in web browsers. You can't even hack around this with tabindex, at least in Gecko and WebKit, though those seem like browser bugs (Presto gets this right).