Safari anchors on links not working.

Question

My html anchor is as follows.

<a name="template-8"/>
<h4 class="template" id="template-8">A title</h4>

As far as I know the browser should skip to the element with a matching name or id attribute.

When I type in the url http://my.site.com/templates#template-8 safari jumps down the page as expected.

However when linking as below the anchor does nothing. Chrome, Opera, IE7 and Firefox all work.

<a href="http://my.site.com/templates#template-8"&gt;A link</a>

Safari is version 5.0, could this be a safari bug?

Answer 1

The problem was I had a redirect header in the page I was linking to.

Opera, IE, Chrome, Firefox will carry over the anchor to the new page. However safari loses the anchor on the redirect.

If you are having trouble with safari anchors disable any redirects.

Answer 2

There are two side issues I see, which aren't the cause (since you found the problem already) but probably don't help:

• Self-closing <a> tag. You can't self-close tags that are supposed to have end tags, it should be: <a name="template-8"></a>.
• The name and id attributes share the same "namespace", so you cannot have the same value for a name and id attribute. All browsers from the past 10 years support anchors on IDs, so scrap that useless link tag.