Prevent a link to reload page

Question

I am creating a responsive menu: Codepen Demo

To avoid the page to be reloaded when I click a link I have:

$('nav.menu a[href="#"]').click(function () {
  $(this).preventDefault();
});

But this does not seem to work. When I click a button the menu disappears.

Does anyone knows what I am be doing wrong?

Answer 1

It's not the element that need a .preventDefault(), its the click event.

Try this:

$('nav.menu a').click(function (event) {
  event.preventDefault();
  // or use return false;
});

I don't recommend to use the href as selector though, better to give it an id or name.

From MDN, about .preventDefault():
Cancels the event if it is cancelable, without stopping further propagation of the event.

You can read more here:

• MDN: event.preventDefault()
• jQuery: Selectors

---

There is a CSS way, using pointer-events.

So by using in the CSS pointer-events: none; all click will be ignored. This is a "recent" alternative and suported in IE11+, Firefox 3.6+, Chrome 2.0+, Safari 4+.

Example