Question

On my HTML page, I want to be able to ‘go to’ / ‘scroll to’ / ‘focus on’ an element on the page.

Normally, I’d use an anchor tag with a href="#something", but I’m already using the hashchange event along with the BBQ plugin to load this page.

So is there any other way, via JavaScript, to have the page go to a given element on the page?

Here’s the basic outline of what I’m trying to do:

function focusOnElement(element_id) {
     $('#div_' + element_id).goTo(); // need to 'go to' this element
}

<div id="div_element1">
   yadda yadda 
</div>
<div id="div_element2">
   blah blah
</div>

<span onclick="focusOnElement('element1');">Click here to go to element 1</span>
<span onclick="focusOnElement('element2');">Click here to go to element 2</span>

Answer 1

The standard technique in plugin form would look something like this:

(function($) {
    $.fn.goTo = function() {
        $('html, body').animate({
            scrollTop: $(this).offset().top + 'px'
        }, 'fast');
        return this; // for chaining...
    }
})(jQuery);

Then you could just say $('#div_element2').goTo(); to scroll to <div id="div_element2">. Options handling and configurability is left as an exercise for the reader.