This is an old trick people use to hide affiliate links and redirects via tracking URLs, for example. It's not intrinsically evil as it's providing a way to kee

This is an old trick people use to hide affiliate links and redirects via tracking URLs, for example. It's not intrinsically evil as it's providing a way to keep things working even if JavaScript isn't on, or the site is visited by a bot, for example. It's really the basis of graceful degradation, unobtrusive JavaScript, and the foundation of libraries like jQuery. One interesting lesson here is if you reverse the logic. What if you have an Ajax action triggered by JavaScript? My point is, you should generally trigger actions from linked content instead of random controls like buttons (you can of course place a button inside a link or style the link as a button). This way, bots and non-JS browsers will still be able to follow it.