A common practice when architecting HTML is to wrap a group of elements with an anchor tag. This is so that clicking any of the elements within the anchor tag takes you to a linked page.
An example of this would be creating a button on a page.
<a href="https://michaelsoolee.com/subscribe" class="btn btn-primary">
Click here to Subscribe
<span class="icon icon-arrow"></span>
</a>
One of the benefits of using an anchor tag like this, is that you automatically get a pointer &mdash the little hand with the pointer finger raised — for the cursor.
Turns out, if you forget the href attribute from the anchor tag, you lose the cursor benefit. According to the official HTML spec doc for anchor tags:
The href attribute on a and area elements is not required; when those elements do not have href attributes they do not create hyperlinks.
Although the href attribute is not required, leaving it out does not create a hyperlink thus causing the element to not have the added benefit of the pointer cursor automatically.
So remember, when making a link, don’t forget the href attribute.