This change was detected by yy084 the HN HTML-to-SQL utility I use. Easy to fix but I had not seen <a> elements with no attributes before hence I got curious and looked at the HTML specification.

Excerpt from https://web.archive.org/web/20250702164847/https://html.spec...

"If the a element has an href attribute, then it represents a hyperlink (a hypertext anchor) labeled by its contents.

If the a element has no href attribute, then the element represents a placeholder for where a link might otherwise have been placed, if it had been relevant, consisting of just the element's contents.

The target, download, ping, rel, hreflang, type, and referrerpolicy attributes must be omitted if the href attribute is not present."

To reproduce, something like

   grep -Eo "[dead] <a>.{100}" yc.htm 
   grep -Eo "[dead] <a rel.{100}" yc.htm 

where yc.htm is a collection of recent HN pages^1 (here yc.htm is 28MB)

1. As in https://news.ycombinator.com/newest?next=44618687&n=31 et seq.

Did you mean to mess up the link in your submission? :D