What if <a> doesn't begin with href?
Then IE doesn't fuck up apparently.
The objective is to emulate IE's broken algorithm, which also overlooks this. See also bug 20780 comment #3 and below.
Ah ok, I hadn't read the bug. I knew I was stupid and used the precense of <a href as the trigger, didn't know it was so stupid as to only work in that order.
I was stupid -> it was stupid