Back in the day, when web pages tended to be walls of text, a nifty navigation concept was born – Anchor links, which looked something like this “somesite.com#article1“, and when clicked would skip down to said location. However they quickly fell out of fashion as web evolved. Now, as single page apps are all the rage anchor tags are making a comeback, but not as anchor links but as javascript animations: Click a link and the page will actually scroll.
It’s all fancy but there is one downside – Accessability. Have a browser that does not run javascript or just want to send a link to said position? You’re out of luck. Anchor links would solve this issue by not relying on javascript and changing the URL as you clicked the link but they are not sexy. Also, the problem with anchor links is that.. well, they suck at usability as well – When you are warped to a different position in the article you lose the mental context of the page structure; you might as well be on a different page altogether.
So, let’s bring back the sexy to anchor tags!
Enhance Anchors is a simple jQuery plugin, which when loaded, will enhance simple anchor tags (ie. “somesite.com#article2“) with smooth javascript scrolling transitions while retaining the good parts of a anchor link. It even supports back button (where possible)! And it’s as easy as just loading the plugin and you’re done.
Check it out at:
https://github.com/zonear/jquery.enhanceanchors