Link Scrolls Up To 4 Lines Below It's Related Anchor: Why?

David Fenstermacher

The Anchor is at the top of the page followed by Table of Contents. Further down the page is a Link which references this Anchor. When one clicks on this Link, the page scrolls up to about 4 lines below the Anchor position. One has to manually scroll the rest of the way up in order to see the full table of contents. Why does it not scroll all the way back up to the Anchor position?

The only work around I have found is to add 4 blank lines between the top anchor and the table of contents macro. So, that the full table of contents will show up when the below Link is clicked.

Any thoughts on what would cause the link to not scroll completely up to the anchor location?

Diego_88dj6o

Hello there, @David Fenstermacher . Thanks for sharing with the community!

So, let me start by explaining how Anchors work in Confluence.

When we insert an Anchor Macro on a Confluence page, it will create a header element with an ID. The ID will be based on the anchor name that was specified earlier.

This is how the header element looks like when inspecting the page:

Anchors in Confluence are anchor links by the HTML definition. Since this is a default element within HTML, W3 has documentation on it. Here take a look:

• [W3 Docs] How to Create an Anchor Link to Jump to a Specific Part of a Page

 

How the anchor redirect happens is solely based on the browser interpretation of anchors. Here is how the anchor I created look like in Mozilla Firefox:

And here is the same anchor, but in Google Chrome:

As you can see, the "My Anchor is here" text does not show up in Chrome. On the other hand, it does show in Firefox.

For short, how anchors are going to behave is based on the browser. Confluence inserts the anchor and the browser interprets how to display it.

Your workaround should take care of this behavior in browsers that do display this different behavior.

I hope this helps you out, David!