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HTML

Posted by Abhijit Jagtap
Abhijit Jagtap
941 Points

what's the difference between href="articles/2017/article.html#vr-article"/ and href="articles/2017/article.html".

If I remove #vr-article"/ , it makes no difference and links to the same page. Can anyone please help me to understand how # works in linking to different sections of a webpage

1 Answer

Jacob Tollette
Jacob Tollette
27,884 Points
Jacob Tollette
Jacob Tollette
27,884 Points

href="articles/2017/article.html#vr-article"/

href="articles/2017/article.html

They do both go to the same page; however, the first link, with the "#" (octothorpe/hashtag/poundsign/tic-tac-toe-thing) is linking to a specific anchor within that page. For example, if you have a "div" or other element on the page with an ID of "vr-article", it will link to that section of that page. You could also just set an anchor element with a name attribute equivalent to "vr-article" and it will link just the same. Here's an example:

Let's assume this is "index.html"

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Home Page</title>
</head>
<body>
<a href="/articles/2017/article.html#vr-article">View the VR Article</a>
</body>
</html>

Now let's assume this is "article.html"

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Article Page</title>
</head>
<body>
<a href="#vr-article">View the VR Article</a>
<article id = "vr-article">
<h2>Super-Amazing VR article</h2>
<p>Some stuff</p>
</article>
</body>
</html>

Here's an alternate version with the anchor tag I mentioned:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Article Page</title>
</head>
<body>
<a href="#vr-article">View the VR Article</a>
<article>
<h2><a name="vr-article">Super-Amazing VR article</a></h2>
<p>Some stuff</p>
</article>
</body>
</html>

In all three cases, the link points to the article container that has the "Super-Amazing VR article"

Abhijit Jagtap
Abhijit Jagtap
941 Points

Thank you Jacob, that was really helpful.