So, if you're writing a story on El Reg, and you want to include a smaller version of an image that people can click on to open a larger version, how would you do it?
If you said '<a href="big_image.jpg"><img src="small_image.jpg"></a>', you clearly haven't put your Complicator's Gloves on first. No, this is how you do it:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/11/doctor_who_50th_anniversary_pic/:
What's the result of all that javascripty goodness? The exact same as doing it the simple way; you get an image that you click on and the browser navigates to it. Oh, unless you try to middle-click it (or "Open in new tab" from the context menu), in which case you get navigated to the thumbnail instead.
How is that useful?
EDIT: OMG, it's worse than I thought; I wasn't looking carefully enough. Even when you enable scripts, clicking on the image doesn't take you to the larger one that's mentioned in all those invisible zero-sized links; it just takes you to the small version as well. I thought it was just zoomed out.
D'OH!