Question

I use alert boxes to warn the user about errors when submitting a form on a website I am working on, but each time I click the “ok” button to close the alert box, the page go back to the top and I need to scroll down again to see the form.

I checked other website but this does not happen despite the code is pretty much the same.
What is wrong?

Answer 1

The page jumping to the top is usually a sign that you are linking to '#' but not cancelling the action – I’ve never seen that happen on a form submit myself.

Here’s an example of something which might cause the page to jump:

// HTML
<a href="#" onclick="return doSomething()">

// JS
function doSomething() {
    blah();
    x = 5 / 0;      // divide by zero error, therefore the next line
    return false;   // is not executed
}

After the page jumps, look in the address bar. Is there a # at the end?

Just make sure that onclick or onsubmit functions always return false if you don’t want the default action to occur.