HTML: Making a link lead to the anchor centered in the middle of the page

Question

I have a link to an anchor on my html page. When the link is clicked it causes the page to scroll to the anchor so that the anchor is at the very top of the visible part of the page. How can I make the page scroll so that the anchor will be in the middle of the page?

Answer 1

Determine what part of your page you actually want at the top, and place the anchor there instead. You won't be able to change the way browsers interpret anchors - at least not without upsetting your users.

Answer 2

I'd try putting a negative margin (or other positioning method) equal to half the page height on the target anchor tag.

Answer 3

There is no straight way of doing this in pure html\css. It is possible though using js, by getting the element's top location and setting the page's top position to that element's position minus half of the page's height.

Answer 4

Since "middle of the page" is relative to the size of the user's screen and window at any given time, you are going to have to use Javascript to achieve this, as there is no way in pure HTML/CSS to get the vertical screen width.

Answer 5

Firefox supports setting a padding-top property on the named anchor. From there, you could set a cookie via javascript that contains the browser's dimensions, and adjust your padding-top accordingly server-side. To the end user, it would look like its pure html/css, but noam is correct in that a wee bit of JS is needed to get the browser's dimensions, since it doesn't give you this information without a little coercion.