Why does text appear on web form when it is not in my code?

Question

User695372294 posted

A website I created 12 years ago has suddenly started to display the text "Skip Navigation Links" at the top of my main menu. I strongly suspect that this has been generated by some code associated with my original website template (which I think came from Microsoft), though I have no idea what has made this text appear now after such a long time. The website has had no recent changes.

The Inspector tab of Firefox's Developer Tools tells me that the unexpected text is derived from the following page source code. My problem is that when I search my entire project using Visual Studio I can find no reference to the text "Skip Navigation Links". Can anyone suggest where I might find the code that is generating this text?

<a href="#MyMaster_mainMenu1_SkipLink">
<img alt="Skip Navigation Links" 
src="/WebResource.axd?d=kwjnygs6Mz4nERGkPUpvi6N85gDyNXqXskDPrjNmEVsnkQ7nQSgkTc5NH0SYviCbNEaDpCfALuChN6Vtpoz60PR8r8c1&amp;t=637100806445053551" 
style="border-width:0px;" width="0" height="0">
</a>

Answer 1

User-943250815 posted

I made simple search by "asp.net webforms Skip Navigation Links", then found this
https://forums.asp.net/t/960639.aspx?Rendering+problem+with+ASP+Menu+Skip+Navigation+Links+image

Hope drive you in some direction

Answer 2

User695372294 posted

Thanks jzero, you did indeed point me in the right direction :)

I must confess that I had not tried searching the forum for 'Skip Navigation Links' before making my original post. With hindsight, that was a silly mistake. At the time, I thought the rendered code sample was unique to my site and my primary focus was on finding out why I could not find any reference to it in my own code. I was unaware that it was a default setting of SkipLinkText within the asp:Menu control and thus not explicitly quoted in my code. I now appear to have resolved the problem by configuring asp:Menu with a setting of SkipLinkText="".

However, I am still bewildered by why this problem suddenly popped up in 2020 for a website I created in 2008. The link you provided was dated 2006, so other people hit this problem before I even started to create this website! Two of my other websites have also been similarly afflicted. one of which has never been updated since June 2019.

Perhaps ASP.NET is susceptible to infection by Covid-19...