html - Is there a way to bookmark or link to a section of a page without an anchor?

Question

Is there a way to bookmark or link to an HTML page (which I am not author of) without having an anchor in the HTML code?

I want the page to get scrolled down to a particular section when accessed from a bookmark or hyperlink even if there is no anchor tag in the destination page.

Note: the destination page has an anchor tag as "foo" then bookmarking like http:/...hello.html#foo will not only take the user to hello.html, but also automatically scroll down to the section of the page so that the anchor tag "foo" is at the top of the screen.

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7983290/is-there-a-way-to-bookmark-or-link-to-a-section-of-a-page-without-an-anchor

Answer 1

You only need to have the appropriate id attribute on an element to use it like a bookmark...

<a href="#test">Test</a>

...

<p id="test">Hello world</p>

See the W3C specification: Anchors with the id attribute

Older specifications also allowed navigation based on the name attribute, but this attribute has been removed from the latest HTML specifications (but if there is a name attribute it may be used in the same way as an id attribute).

If there is no id or name attribute where you wish to navigate to, there is no way of navigating to the specific point within the page, only to the page itself. In this case you may want to quote the pertinent information and supply a citation with a link or perhaps ask the author if they would add an id.