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January 17th, 2003

A Long-Missing Browser Feature

If you’ve done a little HTML, you know how you can use <a href=”page.html#anchor”> to link to a specific section of another page that contains <a name=”anchor”> code. It’s usually used on long pages to allow someone to link to a specific area in the middle of the page. But what happens when the link points to something at the bottom of the page? Often, if there are several small sections, the link doesn’t actually focus the browser where the web developer intended, because the browser scrolls far enough that the text hits the bottom of the window, but no further.

So, why don’t browser developers change the code so that if a specific anchor within a page is called, that it is automatically at the top of the browser window, and whitespace is added to the bottom of the page as necessary? This whitespace wouldn’t exist if one were to scroll to the bottom of a page, only if a link of this sort made it possible.

Is this thing on?

Posted in Technology

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