title: Why does trying to replace an image source browse to the image instead?
body: <p>I am new to JavaScript (only a couple of days of reading a book) and I am stuck on this code snippet. I have looked at it over and over again but cannot seem to figure out why it is not working. I am sure it is something really simple that I have just overlooked, and I just need a fresh pair of eyes to look at this. </p>
  
  <p>The code is supposed to update a placeholder image on a page without the page having to reload. But when I am clicking on the link of an image, it is taking me to the link where the image is located instead of replacing the placeholder image. Here is my HTML code:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"&gt;
  &lt;html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"&gt;
  &lt;head&gt;
  &lt;meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" /&gt;
  &lt;title&gt;Image Gallery&lt;/title&gt;
  &lt;script type="text/javascript" src="scripts/showPic.js"&gt;&lt;/script&gt;
  &lt;/head&gt;
  &lt;body&gt;
  
      &lt;h1&gt;Snapshots&lt;/h1&gt;
      &lt;ul&gt;
          &lt;li&gt;
          &lt;a href="images/cat.jpg" onclick="showPic(this); return false;" title="A Cat"&gt;Cat&lt;/a&gt;
          &lt;/li&gt;
          &lt;li&gt;
          &lt;a href="images/night.jpg" onclick="showPic(this); return false;" title="Night"&gt;Night&lt;/a&gt;
          &lt;/li&gt;
          &lt;li&gt;
          &lt;a href="images/coke.jpg" onclick="showPic(this); return false;" title="Coke"&gt;Coke&lt;/a&gt;
          &lt;/li&gt;
          &lt;li&gt;
          &lt;a href="images/sport.jpg" onclick="showPic(this); return false;" title="Sports"&gt;Sport&lt;/a&gt;
          &lt;/li&gt;
          &lt;li&gt;
          &lt;a href="images/mnms.png" onclick="showPic(this); return false;" title="MnM's"&gt;MnM's&lt;/a&gt;
          &lt;/li&gt;
          &lt;li&gt;
          &lt;a href="images/kid.jpg" onclick="showPic(this); return false;" title="A Kid"&gt;Kid&lt;/a&gt;
          &lt;/li&gt;
      &lt;/ul&gt;
  
      &lt;br /&gt;
  
      &lt;img id="placeholder" src="images/placeholder.jpg" alt="Place Holder Image" /&gt;
  
  &lt;/body&gt;
  &lt;/html&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>And here is the JavaScript function I am using to get this done:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;script type="text/javascript"&gt;
  
  function showPic(whichpic) { 
      var source = whichpic.getAttribute("href"); 
      var placeholder = document.getElementById("placeholder"); 
      placeholder.setAttribute("src",source);
  }
  
  &lt;/script&gt;
  </code></pre>