Glossary

Anchor

An anchor in HTML is the destination of a hyperlink, defined within the <a> HTML element. An anchor by itself may be linking, linked or predetermined. This is an example of a linking anchor:

<a href="http://www.find-keyword.com/glossary/#thesaurus" hreflang="en" title="link to the definition of thesaurus" lang="en" type="text/html">my thesaurus</a>

In this example the anchor text, or link text, is "my thesaurus".

The corresponding linked anchor acts as a bookmark on the linked page and may look like this:

<a name="thesaurus">Thesaurus</a>

Predetermined anchors are proprietary, like the top of the page as a link target, which is stated as:

<a href="#top">go to the top</a>

Link targets don't have to be anchors. In newer HTML standards it's also possible to link on elements, given the id attribute like this:

<h1 id="thesaurus">Thesaurus</h1>