jQuery Forum

I don't think there is anything that you can do in this case. When links are injecting using JavaScript, IE always seems to return the fully qualified URL when you get its href.

I've basically come to the same conclusion as Karl and in general heavily use regexp with $ to match on end of string patterns to treat these across browsers.

something like

if( $(selector).attr('href').match(/#pattern$/) )

this is the gist of it anyway, details may vary.  The important take away is the regexp only care about the end of the url and can optimize matching across browsers since IE7/(IE6 also?) will return the resolved absolute url.  I have to admit I even sometimes wish the general behavior was to return absolute urls but dont really know why each browser choose the pattern they did.  Probably a good google for some javascript history lessons.

Thatcher

Also, using a self-closing tag for an element that *requires* content isn't recommended. For the special case of <a /> jQuery uses createElement, but since there is more complex markup there it's passed to IE via innerHTML.  The docs are pretty clear about this:

 To ensure cross-platform compatibility, the snippet must be well-formed. Tags that can contain other elements should be paired with a closing tag -- http://api.jquery.com/jQuery/

I believe this is closed, http://dev.jquery.com/ticket/7117

It appears that only <a> elements generated programmatically using strings exhibit this problem. Elements that are generated like $('<a>', { href: '#foo' }) work properly, as do elements that existed in the document when it was loaded.

Short of scanning all strings passed to jQuery and html for anchors and manually resetting their attributes, there is almost certainly no way that jQuery can work around this issue, as IE is irreparably modifying the href property when building elements from strings. You can see this by inspecting the generated markup (the href attribute magically becomes absolute). As a result, this is probably only going to be a documentation fix.