Question

I have a question that will be found very often. The problem is that nowhere can be found an explicit solution.

I have two problems regarding anchors.

The main goal should be to get a nice clean url without any hashes in it while using anchors to jump on a page.

So the structure of the anchors is:

<ul>
    <li><a href="#one">One</a></li>
    <li><a href="#two">Two</a></li>
    <li><a href="#three">Three</a></li>
</ul>

<div class="wrap">
    <a name="one">text 1</a>
    <a name="two">text 2</a>
    <a name="three" class="box">text 3</a>
</div>

Okay, if you will click one of the links the url will automatically change to

http://www.domain.com/page#1

At the end this should be just:

http://www.domain.com/page

So far, so good. Now the second thing is, when you search the internet for that problem you will find javascript as a solution.

I have found this function:

function jumpto(anchor){
    window.location.href = "#"+anchor;
}

and calling that function with:

<a onclick="jumpto('one');">One</a>

what will be the same like before. It will add the hash to the url. I also added

<a onclick="jumpto('one'); return false;">

without success. So if there is someone who could tell me how to solve this I really would appreciate.

Thanks a lot.

Answer 1

You can get the coordinate of the target element and set the scroll position to it. But this is so complicated.

Here is a lazier way to do that:

function jump(h){
    var url = location.href;               //Save down the URL without hash.
    location.href = "#"+h;                 //Go to the target element.
    history.replaceState(null,null,url);   //Don't like hashes. Changing it back.
}

This uses replaceState to manipulate the url. If you also want support for IE, then you will have to do it the complicated way:

function jump(h){
    var top = document.getElementById(h).offsetTop; //Getting Y of target element
    window.scrollTo(0, top);                        //Go there directly or some transition
}​

Demo: http://jsfiddle.net/DerekL/rEpPA/
Another one w/ transition: http://jsfiddle.net/DerekL/x3edvp4t/

You can also use .scrollIntoView:

document.getElementById(h).scrollIntoView();   //Even IE6 supports this

_{(Well I lied. It’s not complicated at all.)}