You can use <div id="more"></div> as well.

I think this has big ramifications for SE-friendly affiliate systems. See http://zen-sem.blogspot.com/2006/02/urls-with-anchors-affiliate.html for my thoughts.

Seems logical to me. But can it be that easy?

Barry, that won't work.

The article contradicts itself, since it mentions # isn't sent with the URI, then says it can be tracked by the server.

While the browser does know, the server doesn't.

You're better off with using the REFERER if you want to do this.

J

Search engines ignore the # and anything after it. Has anyone actually seen a search result with it in it? Although from a technical standpoint, you could serve different content based on it if you wanted (with PHP for example). The web server does get the full request (with the fragment) in it and server side scripting languages are able to see them. For example:

http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.parse-url.php

Shawn,

I do not believe this is correct. The function exists in PHP, but $_SERVER[REQUEST_URI] does not contain the internal link because I do not believe the browser sends it in the GET. This makes sense, because the browser only needs to know anyway.

J

Jaimie's right, and it doesn't show up at all. The parse_url() function does support it, but that parses any URL you send it.

Shawn, from what I can tell, the parse_url function can parse anchors from a given url string, but PHP has no way of getting the anchor from the current page. It doesn't look like the anchor is included in any of the server variables like PHP_SELF, QUERY_STRING, etc. I would love to do this, though, do you know of a way?

(We're probably way off-topic now...)

Okay... I should have been more specific. Technically it's possible, but most browsers don't send the fragment in the GET request. But if it does send it, PHP can see it and it's logged to the http logs. For example... fragment.php is a PHP script that just does "echo $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];"...

-----
Titan:~ shawn$ telnet www.digitalpoint.com 80
Trying 216.9.35.56...
Connected to crystalmethod.digitalpoint.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET http://www.digitalpoint.com/~shawn/jungle_gym/fragment.php?something=1234#blahblah HTTP/1.1
Host: www.digitalpoint.com

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 01 Feb 2006 21:26:24 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.20 Sun Cobalt (Unix) mod_ssl/2.8.4 OpenSSL/0.9.6 mod_auth_pam_external/0.1 mod_perl/1.26
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html

http://www.digitalpoint.com/~shawn/jungle_gym/fragment.php?something=1234#blahblah

Connection closed by foreign host.
-----
[root httpd]# grep blahblah access
www.digitalpoint.com ##.###.###.### - - [01/Feb/2006:13:26:25 -0800] "GET http://www.digitalpoint.com/~shawn/jungle_gym/fragment.php?something=1234#blahblah HTTP/1.1" 200 94 "-" "-"
-----

Tim Berners-Lee comments on his blog:

"On the web of [x]HTML documents, the links are critical. Links are references to 'anchors' in other documents, and they use URIs which are formed by taking the URI of the document and adding a # sign and the local name of the anchor. This way, local anchors get a global name.

On the Semantic Web, links are also critical. Here, the local name, and the URI formed using the hash, refer to arbitrary things. When a semantic web document gives information about something, and uses a URI formed from the name of a different document, like foo.rdf#bar, then that's an invitation to look up the document, if you want more information about. I'd like people to use them more, and I think we need to develop algorithms which for deciding when to follow Semantic Web links as a function of what we are looking for."

Read more here: http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/node/62

Comments on that blog are very interesting too, so be sure to read those as well.

Saludos,

Nacho

Fragment identifiers in links do not "create a new URL", thus SEs will not treat the sheer URI and its variants with fragement identifiers as duplicates.

Do *not* use the outdated [A NAME="fragment-identifier"][/A] syntax to define anchors. Better add the ID attribute to [x]HTML elements like P/Hx/UL/IMG..., for example [p id="fragment-identifier"].

http://www.smart-it-consulting.com/article.htm?node=155&page=90#href-fragment-identifier

How does Mediapartners see the FI?