title: Href behaviour - need clarity
body: <p>I have code like this on the profile page of my website.</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;div class="col-md-4"&gt;
      &lt;h2 class="textclass2" style="text-decoration: underline; margin-bottom: 10px"&gt;&lt;%=playerdata.Player_Name%&gt;   AKA  &lt;%=playerdata.Player_NickName%&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;
      &lt;a class="btn btn-dark btn-xs" href="&lt;%=playerdata.Player_FBLink%&gt;" id="fbclick" onClick="checkUrl()" style="font-size: 12px; color:#40FF40; margin-bottom: 10px "&gt; Facebook &lt;/a&gt;
      &lt;a class="btn btn-dark btn-xs" href="&lt;%=playerdata.Player_InstagramLink%&gt;" role="button" style="font-size: 12px; color:#40FF40; margin-bottom: 10px"&gt; Instagram &lt;/a&gt;
      &lt;a class="btn btn-dark btn-xs" href="&lt;%=playerdata.Player_LinkedinProfile%&gt;" role="button" style="font-size: 12px; color:#40FF40; margin-bottom: 10px"&gt; LinkedIN &lt;/a&gt;
      &lt;a class="btn btn-dark btn-xs" href="&lt;%=playerdata.Player_TwitterLink%&gt;" role="button" style="font-size: 12px; color:#40FF40; margin-bottom: 10px"&gt; Twitter &lt;/a&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>This is done using EJS. They are basically href tags that have the URL string of the users social pages. The backend is a MongoDB</p>
  
  <p>Question - If I enter a valid URL in the respective field in the database, I am getting redirected to the correct URL. However if the string is empty, its posting a GET request to /profile/:username. </p>
  
  <p>Is this the way href tags normally behave? If yes, what is the way to circumvent. Basically if the string is empty, I don't want to execute a GET call, but simply flash a message to the user saying that the string is empty. </p>