I spy in Firebug's HTML panel:
<div class="vote"><!-- other children omitted for brevity --> <a title="This question shows research effort; it is useful and clear" class="vote-up-off">up vote</a> </div>
Note that the
a has no
href attribute. I remember not too long ago that Pentadactyl's hint mode would detect vote buttons, for instance I could type
gg f up vote 1 to vote up the question.
This is no longer the case. It seems like the vote anchors recently lost their
href attribute (or something else happened that made the buttons no longer appear as "clickable" to Pentadactyl). Why is this?
I managed to work around the problem with a bookmarklet that adds
href="#" to all vote buttons, but I'd like to know the reasoning behind this design choice. I suppose it's bad practice to set the
href attribute if the anchor isn't supposed to send the browser to another page, but why not use
<button>s instead, as demonstrated by this jsFiddle? After all, that's what
<button>s are for.