ngHref prematurely adds href attribute when string is included as part of the expression #6984
Description
The ngHref doc page gives an example of the correct way of using ngHref to avoid broken URLs until {{hash}} is evaluated.
<a ng-href="http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/{{hash}}"/>
I've created a plunker that demonstrates that this generates the href attribute right away, prior to the {{hash}} evaluating, so the full url is not yet valid.
My understanding is that we should not see either link until {{hash}} is filled in (via the input box), but in the first link example in this plunker we do see an active link:
I traced through and it seems that the $observe() call is placed on the whole ngHref value and not just the {{hash}}.
Seeing this happen in Angular 1.2.9 through 1.3.0-beta.4 (which the Plunker example is using). Reproduced in Chrome and Safari.
I wasn't able to find a similar bug report.
Potential fix:
The fix might be parsing the ngHref attribute and just observing when the {{hash}} changes and not the string around it. Here was the snippet that was adding the observers in booleanAttrs.js.
attr.$observe(normalized, function(value) {
if (!value)
return;
attr.$set(name, value);
// <removed note about IE>
});