I have a link that I want to be able to click to trigger a piece of jQuery code.

Currently I have

<a href="#" id="foo">Link</a>

and

$('#foo').click(function(){
  // Do stuff
});

which works well. But, I have always hated using hash in this way. The page flickers and the hash is added to the page url.

One alternative is to use

<a href="javascript:void(0);" id="foo">Link</a>

but I also dislike seeing that piece of code in the browser status bar. It looks tacky.

What I'd rather have is an explanatory javascript placeholder that does nothing, like

<a href="javascript:zoom();" id="foo">Link</a>

which actually works, but throws an ReferenceError in the javascript console since there are no such function. What's the minimum definition of a function that does nothing?

Are there any other alternatives?

Should I just skip the link and use something like

<span id="foo" style="cursor:pointer;cursor:hand;">Link</span>

instead?