Is it a good practice to use an empty URL for a HTML form's action attribute? (action=“”)

Question

I am wondering if anyone can give a \"best practices\" response to using blank HTML form actions to post back to the current page.

There is a post asking what a blan

Answer 1

Actually, the Form Submission subsection of the current HTML5 draft does not allow action="". It is against the spec.

The action and formaction content attributes, if specified, must have a value that is a valid non-empty URL potentially surrounded by spaces. (emphasis added)

The quoted section in mercator's answer is a requirement on implementations, not authors. Authors must follow the author requirements. To quote How to read this specification:

In particular, there are conformance requirements that apply to producers, for example authors and the documents they create, and there are conformance requirements that apply to consumers, for example Web browsers. They can be distinguished by what they are requiring: a requirement on a producer states what is allowed, while a requirement on a consumer states how software is to act.

The change from HTML4—which did allow an empty URL—was made because “browsers do weird things with an empty action="" attribute”. Considering the reason for the change, its probably best not to do that in HTML4 either.