Chris Bosco

In-page links (or, links that jump to specific areas of the current page) are definitely useful for lengthy or text-heavy sites, and often essential when these pages are consumed by screenreaders or "legacy" mobile devices. But they can also be disorienting for many reasons — did I just move up the page? Down it? With the instantaneous transition the browser provides by default, a user is left to guess.

I wouldn't be the first to suggest overriding this behavior with a scrolling effect that illuminates which direction you've traveled, and also how far. A global, automatic solution would be ideal. For animated effects, a robust JavaScript library can save a lot of time, and I'll use the popular jQuery library for this example. Out of the box, jQuery does not have this functionality, and although there is an appropriate plugin, I was determined to cobble together my own solution so as to avoid loading an additional plugin only to use it in this one instance.

A quick seach brought me to Learning jQuery, where there is a great solution I've shamelessly copied (with very minor modification). I will walk through this solution below, although I recommend reading the original breakdown at Learning jQuery.

$(document).ready(function() {
    $('a[href*=#]').click(function() {
        var target = $('a[name=' + this.hash.split('#')[1] + ']');
        if (target.length) {
            var targetOffset = target.offset().top - 2;
            $('html,body').animate({scrollTop: targetOffset}, 'fast');
            return false;
        }
    });
});

1. Attach a click event to every anchor element with an href attribute beginning with a '#' (e.g. any in-page link).

   $('a[href*=#]').click(function() { ... });
   

2. Get the link's destination on the page using its hash property. hash refers to the portion of any URL that begins with '#'. Use this in another selector to get the anchor element on this page with the corresponding name attribute. Save this as the target variable.

   var target = $('a[name=' + this.hash.split('#')[1] + ']');
   

3. If this element exists on the page (target collection length greater than zero), get the distance from the top of the page to this element and save it as targetOffset (note that I subtract 2 to give a little bit of breathing room visually; this way the element doesn't touch the top of the browser frame).

   if (target.length) {
       var targetOffset = target.offset().top - 2;
       //...
   }
   

4. Now use jQuery's built-in animate() method to scroll the page itself (grabbing the html or body element in case the browser is in quirksmode).

   $('html,body').animate({scrollTop: targetOffset}, 'fast');
   

5. Return false because now you don't actually follow this link.

   return false;
   

You can see this in action in many areas of this site as long as you have javascript enabled. For example, try clicking the "top ↑" link in the right-hand column.

It's of note that the animate() method takes a variety of arguments. I've only supplied the target for scrollTop and the speed ("fast"), but it's a very powerful function. A third argument, easing, is available via a plugin, and can make the animation look much more natural. In my case, however, I opted for less code overhead and omitted this. The final argument, callback, provides for some interesting possibilities, but I also found it to be unnecessary for this case.