There’s an HTML pattern that has been bugging me for a while even though I’m guilty of using it too. It’s even present on page you are reading right now.

Almost every page has a navigation bar and chances are that strip is presented as some kind of a list of links. Just as it should be. What bothers me is that when you actually are on page listed in navigation, its navigation item will still contain a link to it.

This reference to itself is like having a door in a room which leads you back in. Not very useful and certainly misleading.

Better approach is to simply not have a link when that link would point to page itself. Such HTML is also more semantic, since it’s clear which item was selected and where we are even without a style sheet.

When discussing this observation it was pointed out to me that with proliferation of Javascript and AJAX you might want to give your visitors a way to bring a page to a known state by reloading it. I think this is more than adequately solved by reload button that every browser has and most users know, but if you find having a link a better solution, why not try a compromise. Just add the missing link with Javascript in spirit of this demo .

This way you won’t polute content markup with behavior that should sit on top of it.