Empty value is getting added as a link to a text.

[vanathishiv]

📝 Provide detailed reproduction steps (if any)

1. …Enter any text in the editor
2. …Click and select on Link in toolbar without entering anything.
3. …Empty hyperlink is getting added.

✔️ Expected result

Empty value shouldn't be getting added as a link.

❌ Actual result

Empty value is getting added as a link to a text.

📃 Is this the expected behavior or is there anyway we could have validation?

• Browser: … Google Chrome 105
• OS: … Windows 10 Pro/Win64; x64

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If you'd like to see this fixed sooner, add a 👍 reaction to this post.

[vanathishiv]

It would be great, if we could get any update on this.

[Reinmar]

CKE5 needs to preserve empty links as they unfortunately may exist in a content. 

As for the UI, there's no validation indeed. How do you think it should work? And why do you think there should be validation?

[vanathishiv]

so, earlier in CKe4 the URL was a mandatory field in the popup of link so when user doesn't enter it'll throw an error.
Now we are able to add a hyperlink without giving one and on further saving, empty value is getting added as a link to a text and that could be misleading to the customers.

So the customers were expecting the behaviour to be same as of CKe4.
We got reply from the support team saying "Unfortunately, currently we have no plans for changing this behaviour. I will let you know if we decide to work in that in the future."

[joegl]

This is a big regression for us going from CKEditor 4 to CKEditor 5. We allow content editors to put button styles on <a> elements and previously they were not allowed to create links without URL's. Now users are complaining there are buttons on their site that don't link anywhere. It's certainly user error and you'd want users to to not do that, but that's not how users work. And this didn't use to even be a possible, so it's definitely a regression.

We're not asking for empty URL's to be banned everywhere. It'd just be nice to have a mechanism/option to not allow empty URL's that we could configure.

[joegl]

CKE5 needs to preserve empty links as they unfortunately may exist in a content.

Preserving empty links in the editor isn't a problem, it's being allowed to create them in the first place. We don't want to strip them if they're in the editor, and meant to be there. We just don't want our users to be allowed to create them without manually editing the source code. Just a toggleable option to prevent blank input in the URL field would suffice.

[Witoso]

Thanks @joegl for feedback! I will bring it for discussions internally on our side.

[Witoso]

Internally, we decided on the future scope:

• There's going to be a configuration option that manages that, for example allowEmptyLinksCreation.
• By default, the editor should not allow creation of empty links via the UI (form validation, allowEmptyLinksCreation:false).
• To allow it (and disable validation) set allowEmptyLinksCreation:true
• Migration guide needs to be prepared.

The editor will still preserve empty links when loaded.

[joegl]

@Witoso That sounds wonderful! Thanks for your considerations and responding to this. When would you anticipate this change being completed and release?

[Witoso]

No ETA yet, this will enter our support queue as an improvement.