Why can't I click a link to open a file from an MVC web page
<p>I've got a simple MVC web page that pops up a dialogue box with a list of hyperlinks to files. They're properly prefixed with &quot;file://&quot; and the links work properly if copied to the clipboard and pasted into a browser window.  However, from within the dialogue, clicking on the linked files returns... nothing.</p>
<p>Nothing at all happens.  The behavior is identical in Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Chrome.  No warnings, errors, etc.</p>
<p>Visually my dialogue looks like this:</p>
<p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/UnXbg.jpg" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/UnXbg.jpg" alt="enter image description here" /></a></p>
<p>If I &quot;inspect element&quot; on one of the links, for example, the top one for &quot;javascript notes.txt&quot;, it looks like this:</p>
<p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/kYRBg.jpg" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/kYRBg.jpg" alt="enter image description here" /></a></p>
<p><strong>This IS a valid hyperlink</strong>.  As mentioned above, I can copy the link into the address bar of a browser and the linked file opens fine.  I can also copy the full HTML of the element into notepad, wrapped in  tags and save as an .html file, and the link works just fine from there.  The links just don't work in the dialogue--from any browser.</p>
<p>I'm displaying the links in a Kendo grid currently.  Thinking that might be a problem, I got rid of the grid temporarily and tried displaying them in a plain HTML .  Same problem--clicking on the links produces no result at all.</p>
<p>Am I fighting something deeper here?  Like, I'm using a jquery dialogue to show the list.  do jquery dialogues do something to block hyperlinks from working?</p>
<p>TIA for any help.</p>