Why does the "A href" tag use empty " " if we don't need them?

HTML-CSS
1

Tell us what’s happening:

See below from the lesson on DESCRIPTIVE LINKS. It was confusing because of
the empty “” in the a href tag. I thought I had to move info & batteries into the quotes of
the A HREF tag, but in fact, we had to leave the quotes empty or the lesson would ERROR
out. Why are they even there? Will they be used in future?

may soon be near. Click here information about batteries

2

Basically the quotes are part of the href/attribute syntax and need to be there, but they don’t necessarily need to be filled with anything (though I personally will fill it with a placeholder at least). And yes eventually you would put something in there whether it’s a name reference for a anchor link or a url.

So for example:

<a href=""></a>
<a href="#"></a>
<a href="some placeholder text"></a>

Are all compliant with then syntax.

Meanwhile this:

<a href=></a>

Is not and might throw an error.

3

Just an FYI, Hyoerlink tags without href are valid HTML.

// this is valid HTML per w3.org specs
<a>Examples</a>

See https://www.w3.org/TR/2016/REC-html51-20161101/textlevel-semantics.html#the-a-element

4

Anchor tags without an href are in fact very common.

<a name="foo"> will be the target of the link <a href="#foo">. We’re just so used to URL fragments being used for JS routing that we sometimes forget their original purpose.

5

Thank you all, I appreciate it.
ONE LAST Q . . . I am being brought through the entire first 200 lessons all over again. I am almost done, but I am finding that now the program is not letting me finish each lesson easily, but the software is getting BUGGY the second time around. Is this common?