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There isn't a situation where you must do this. Don't do this.

Quick heuristic: if you have a clickable link and I can't open it in a new tab, you should be using a button instead.

href="javascript:..." is just as bad. I want to hover over a link and see where it goes before I click. That makes navigation fair to the user, as opposed to "guess what's behind door number 3"

href="javascript:;" is also bad. It doesn't work if you try to open it in a new tab. Just use a real url!