Web Design in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

Linking Within a Document

By default, when you link to a page, the browser displays the top of that page. To aid in navigation, you can use the anchor tag to link to a specific point or section within a document. This navigation technique is only effective on long documents. Linking to specific destinations in a document is a two-step process in which you place a marker in the document and give it a name, and then you make a link to that marker.

Naming a fragment

First, identify and name the portion of the document (called a fragment) that you want to link to. The fragment is marked using the anchor (<a>) tag with its name attribute, giving the document fragment a name that can be referenced from a link. Named anchors receive no special style treatment by default (as <a href> links do).

To illustrate, let’s set up a named fragment within a sample document called dailynews.html so users can link directly to the Stock Quotes section of the page. The following anchor tag marks the Stock Quotes title as a fragment named “stocks”.

<H1><A NAME="stocks">Daily Stock Quotes</A></H1>

Fragments can also be named using the id attribute in any element tag. Keep in mind that the id attribute is a newer addition to the HTML specification, so it is not supported in older browsers. In this example, the heading itself serves as a marker:

<H1 ID="stocks">Daily Stock Quotes<H1>

The value of the name and id attributes must be unique within the document (in other words, two elements can’t be given the ...