IDs are anchors, too.
While browsing the internet these days, I see a lot of this:
<body>
...
<a name="top"></a>
...
<a href="#top">- Back to Top -</a>
...
</body>There’s an easier, better and prettier way. CSS Signatures are all the rage these days. If you’re not familiar with a CSS Signature, it’s basically nothing more than an ID on your body tag, like this:
<body id="www-domain-tld">The fundamental purpose of the CSS Signature is to allow a user to specify style adjustments to your site in their own user style sheets. Whether or not users are actually capitalizing on this is a discussion for another day, but doing this has other benefits like having an extra id to use when dealing with CSS specificity.
Additionally, we can use this to capitalize on a little known fact about HTML and anchors: you can use anchors to jump to any element on your page with an ID attribute. Let me repeat that:
You can jump to any element with an ID attribute on any page.
Here is an example, if you don’t believe me. Nowhere on the Perishable Press homepage will you find a link to the footer section. And you will find no mention of <a name="footer"></a> in the code. But if you follow this link to Perishable Press, you will in fact find yourself staring at the footer of the homepage. This is because the footer section (<div>) includes “footer” as the the ID attribute, which allows me to jump directly to that element.
Oh sure, I know what you’re thinking: “Great, so how do I get this to work in IE?” Surprise: it works just fine in IE, at least as far back as IE 5.5 and maybe further. So, here we have a nice, tidy little tidbit with no cross-browser issues.
So, we can do away with the empty anchor element at the top of our pages and instead do this:
<body id="www-domain-tld">
...
<p><a href="#www-domain-tld">- Back to Top -</a></p>
...
</body>Trying to be all kinds of accessible with the “Jump to Content” link? Try this:
<p>
<a href="#content">- Jump to Content -</a>
</p>
...
<div id="content">
<p>Neat, huh?</p>
</div>Also works well on comments:
<p>
<strong>Update:</strong>
Based on <a href="#comment-12345">so and so's comment</a>...
</p>
...
<blockquote id="comment-12345">
<h3>On Day X, so and so said:</h3>
<p>Blah blah blah...</p>
</blockquote>…and comment forms:
<p>
<strong>2 Responses</strong>
<a href="#comment-form">- Jump to Comment Form -</a>
</p>
...
<form id="comment-form" method="post" action="">
...
</form>Using this approach will streamline a lot of your code, allowing you to get rid of a ton of those empty anchor elements. It also allows for greater flexibility when linking to content on other’s sites. Not to mention that using it means you can sit at the cool kid’s table.
38 responses to “IDs are anchors, too.”
I’m sorry Jeff, that URL came out wrong because I had put in an html meta refresh tag and then pasted from there, and the html editor added & inside.
And now I no longer have the question I had.
So please disregard my post! :) Thanks for your reply.
Thank you! I always wondered how to do that…
Sometimes I have polls on my page and I need my visitors to go straight to that part of the page!