Overengineered Anchor Links

I clicked, thinking that it was perhaps someone who like me was annoyed by Jira's anchors/permalinks which is a <span> with a <button> with a JS event listener on click to load what would normally be an <a href> into the DOM.

But this, this is similar, but different. I can't navigate to anchors with for example the keyboard.

Question for the author: Why not use the HTML <a> element rather than a JS event listener on a non-interactive element?

I thought the same. And on this site I cannot even see the proposed anchor link because it's a badly implemented web component custom-element that is all JS defined instead of wrapping actual HTML elements/text. It's such an overengineered anchor link that unless you succssfully execute all the javascript it doesn't appear at all. Very fragile.

> But if you ever had to implement them, you might have encountered the .

Wikipedia is also bad about JS-dependent false anchor links. I can't count the number of times someone "linked" me an "anchor" to an image on a wikipedia article that simply did nothing without javascript. All wikipedia would have to do is put a real html a anchor next to the JS defined one to fix it but despite submitting bugs about this it's never been fixed.

This seems like another case of the web development industry (in general) "fixing" "problems" that aren't really serious problems. I don't know of any user who would be confused by simply being at the bottom of a web page. I didn't look at the code, but my guess is it's a lot of Javascript spending cycles on my machine to solve a non-problem.

I suppose the article author disclosed right away that it's "overegineered" so maybe the post is more of a joke or exercise in absurdity? Nobody would really spend time doing this for a real project, right? RIGHT?