HTML Guide

The href attribute of an <a> element contains an invalid character, that should be properly encoded as a URI percent-encoded character.

An <a> element has been found with an invalid href attribute, containing more than one # adjacent character.

The # is used to separate the fragment part of an URI (typically used to indicate a section within a document). For example, this is a valid link to a URI containing a fragment:

<a href="https://example.com/faqs#pricing">pricing</a>

The next example is invalid because it contains two adjacent # characters, so that the fragment part would be #pricing instead of pricing:

<a href="https://example.com/faqs##pricing">pricing</a>

The href attribute on the link element must not be empty.

For rel="preload" and as="image" only, the imagesizes attribute is a sizes attribute that indicates to preload the appropriate resource used by an img element with corresponding values for its srcset and sizes attributes.

For rel="preload" and as="image" only, the imagesrcset attribute is a sourceset attribute that indicates to preload the appropriate resource used by an img element with corresponding values for its srcset and sizes attributes.

The src attribute on an <img> element contains an invalid character, that should be properly encoded as a URI percent-encoded character.

<a> tags can be used to link to an email address using the mailto protocol in the href attribute. Ensure that there is no space in the email address.

<a href="mailto: liza@example.com">This is wrong as it contains an space</a>

<a href="mailto:liza@example.com">This is OK</a>

The W3C HTML Validator issue you encountered indicates that the URL provided in the href attribute of an anchor (<a>) element is not formatted correctly.

How to Fix the Issue

• Check the Protocol: For a valid URL, make sure that after https: there are two slashes (//).
• Update the URL: Correct the URL format to include the missing slash.

Example of Incorrect HTML

Here is an example of the code that would trigger the validation error:

<a href="https:/example.comf">Example</a>

Corrected HTML

Here’s how the corrected code should look:

<a href="https://example.com">Example</a>

Summary

Make sure that all URLs within href attributes are correctly formatted with both slashes following the protocol (https:// or http://).

Hash (#) characters can be used in an href attribute to link to a specific part of a document.

For example, if we have this page with several sections, each of them marked with an ID:

<h1>Frequently Asked Questions</h1>

<h2 id="pricing">Pricing</h2>
<p>All about pricing...</p>

<h2 id="terms">Terms</h2>
<p>You can find our terms at...</p>

<h2 id="guarantee">Guarantee</h2>
<p>We offer a guarantee...</p>

You can link to a specific part of that document, for example if this page URL is /faqs and you want to link to the Guarantee section you could use:

<a href="/faqs#guarantee">Guarantee</a>

Or, if you’re linking from inside the same document, for example in a table of contents, you could just use:

<a href="#guarantee">Guarantee</a>

As there can only be one fragment in an URL, the # character should only be used once. The following would be an invalid href:

<a href="/faqs#guarantee#pricing">Bad</a>

If needed, the # could be encoded as %23.

Space characters are not allowed in href attributes. Instead, they should be converted to %20. In this example, the first line is invalid and the second is valid:

<a href="https://example.com#some term">invalid</a>
<a href="https://example.com#some%20term">valid</a>