Long web pages were common in the mid to late nineteen nineties. Old servers used to charge by the number of pages you stored on them, and the number of pages that were downloaded. Therefore many developers created long pages on content, instead of breaking it down into smaller chunks.
To make navigation within the page easier, internal links were created. Now you could create an anchor tag to link to a location within a page, without having to reload the page. A simple and perfect example of this would be a link at the bottom of the page which takes you back to the top of the page.
In order for you to have an internal page link, you need two parts – a target and your anchor tag.
In the “old” days, your target could be another anchor tag with a name attribute, however, it is common nowadays to use the id of a tag, and that works the same.
Let’s look at both ways.
Anchor Named Tag
<a name="top"></a>
....rest of page snipped...
<a href="#top">Go to Top of Page</a>Id of Tag
<header id="pageheader">...</header>
....rest of page snipped...
<a href="#pageheader">Go to Top of Page</a>Notice that in both cases, the anchor tag’s href is used to define where it will be located. Additionally, with both of them, it uses the hash mark (#) to define the internal link. So anytime we want to link internally, we identify it as such by using the hash mark as the first character of our href, and then use either the id name, or the name attribute of an anchor tag to let the browser know where to scroll to.
An internal page link looks the same to the end user as any other link. So make sure you provide some context whenever possible.
Note: If a web developer wants to create a link, but the destination doesn’t exist yet, they will sometimes just put a hash mark (#) in the href. This does nothing for the end user, which can be frustrating, so make sure you go back and double check your links to ensure nothing is missing.
Internal Page Links was originally found on Access 2 Learn
