Dreamweaver CC Named Anchor Tag Missing?

[Moonie]

Insert > Named Anchor

This command has been removed. Does it exist elswhere, or does one have to hand code the HTML in DWCC?

[VL Branko]

If you can remember what name you called it, then you can look for it. So now I would have to keep a separate ledger to record any name anchors I put in a site so that I can find them later. That wastes a lot of time and time is money.

[fnegrin]

You need to know the name of what you are looking for to find stuff with Control F , Nancy

[Jon Fritz]

VL Branko wrote:

Another thing is that the name anchor tag was a visual cue that allowed you to quickly find it. Now you have to look though all the code to find it.

While the visual cue is gone (and that's a bit of a bummer), you definitely don't have to look for an id in the source code.

Just  click on the element or  text you want to link to and the id will appear in the properties window.

[VL Branko]

What about the feature I mentioned in #26 that was present in GoLive where you could instantly see where all the name anchors in your site are and effortlessly link to them?

[Jon Fritz]

VL Branko wrote:

What about the feature I mentioned in #26 that was present in GoLive where you could instantly see where all the name anchors in your site are and effortlessly link to them?

That could be a nice addition. Maybe if enough people asked for it here: https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=wishform Adobe might be persuaded to add something like that into DW?

[VL Branko]

Done.

[Mutant Pixel]

This to me is a dealbreaker, seriously. I'm going to uninstall Dreamweaver CC right now! I make anchors all day long and having to hand code them like this is lame. I have thousands of pages already written with named anchors everywhere, I'm not going to change 'standards' and have them implemented different ways in the same document, nor am I going to go through all those pages and update them manually because some group of morons figured out a different way to do it and called it a "standard". Lame, lame, lame.

[Nancy OShea]

That's too bad.  Web designers who don't embrace changes in web standards are destined to become obsolete.   Maybe you should find another line of work where nothing changes and everything stays exactly the same year after year... 

Nancy O.

[Mutant Pixel]

Actually thanks Nancy. That clears a lot up. I am not a web designer at all and I hope to never have that title. Dreamweaver is nothing more than a means to an end for me. I am perfeclty fine with all my "skills" becoming obsolete because it is not my primary line of work. Cheers.

[VL Branko]

Nancy O. wrote:

That's too bad.  Web designers who don't embrace changes in web standards are destined to become obsolete.   Maybe you should find another line of work where nothing changes and everything stays exactly the same year after year... 

Nancy O.

That has been my thought for a long time, been wanting to study Sanskrit. They are still on version 1.0 for the last 5000 years.

[cliftonmeek]

Just because something changes doesn't mean it's good. Getting rid of anchors, which is clear and specific,and therefore quite "semantic" versus a multi-purpose just-use-an-ID anywhere, runs counter to clean/clear coding. Plus, there are times where a good user-oriented programming would want to have an anchor offset from the specific location to give a visual margin form the top of the viewport. Industry is full of change for change sake that fails. You might want to find a career where following the crowd is valued as opposed to thinking for one's self.

[hen3ry]

cliftonmeek:

Thanks for your post:

Just because something changes doesn't mean it's good....

I'm pretty sure that this thread started out as a simple "how to/what happened to..." question and most responses were on-target practical -- if not particularly satisfying.  Your comments take this way out  into standards and even philosophy.   Which is good, but I'm not sure this is the right place.    Not sure what the right place is, tho.

My 2 cents:

(a) Scrolling the target page so that the link target appears at the top of the viewport seems kludgy.  Is that the best we can do for users following links to the interior of a page?   Why not partway down for the sake of context, with a unique indicator of the actual target content?

(b):   Seems like relatively few people these days want to point links at particular points in the interior of target pages, as opposed to the tops, so this corner of the tech isn't getting much attention. Maybe partly because it isn't so easy to do using either the now-deprecated anchors or the newly mandated IDs.  And that's considering links among my own pages.  Links to the interior of pages on other sites?  Besides some sites that maintain good subheader discipline, like Wikipedia ...   unless I'm missing some new and cool technology -- yeah, good luck, just hard and not getting any easier.

[Nancy OShea]

This thread is almost a year old.  I wish a moderator would lock it.

Nancy O.

[cliftonmeek]

hen3ry

My comment was addressing someone who was dissing the basic question with an attitude of "do what Adobe says or you're an idiot."

I agree wholeheartedly with your intention -- I do such in the websites I program. The idea is to scroll to the target, minus an offset of your preference to give the user (my focus) a bit of space and context. Since I also don't like jumps, but prefer autoscrolling to a target, I use jquery.scrollto.js which addresses both user-focused concerns. I also use some jquery custom code to fade-highlight the target element to focus the user's attention.

Philosophically, Dreamweaver is becoming a tool of trendiness and not a tool of productivity and effectiveness. Most of what is "deprecated" on the WORLD wide web won't disappear for years, because outside of the US, basic HTML of years ago is standard. Trendiness doesn't recognize this.

Good luck.

[golf25radioman]

Mutant Pixel wrote:

This to me is a dealbreaker, seriously. I'm going to uninstall Dreamweaver CC right now! I make anchors all day long and having to hand code them like this is lame. I have thousands of pages already written with named anchors everywhere, I'm not going to change 'standards' and have them implemented different ways in the same document, nor am I going to go through all those pages and update them manually because some group of morons figured out a different way to do it and called it a "standard". Lame, lame, lame.

Actually I felt similar when the menu item disappeared for the named anchor, and the replies here seemed to lean towards coding rather than some sort of point/click.  But as I understand it now, the ID tag is easily done by placing your cursor at the point you want to navigate to (as you did with the anchor) and you type in to the Properties tab group's "ID" box what you want the anchor's name to be - much as the former named anchor would ask you for a name.  Then where ever you want to point to that you highlight and in the "Link" box you put your ID's name, as you used to put your anchor's name.  I.E. anchor/ID name of "contact" would be #contact in the link window.  I'm not as well versed in "book learning" HTML but that's how I understand it, hope I was clear enough.  AND you don't have to convert all your old Named Anchors in your other pages, they'll still work as they did.

Tom

[paladyn]

Heh, heh... you could always revert to DW CS6, which still has the named anchor there in the Clasic interface Insert icons, and in the Insert menu. Just sayin'... 😉

[camille minichino]

I used the 2 step process outlined by Jon Fritz II on 7/22 with a number contained in a cell of a table as the item you want to use as the link back to the anchor.

The width of the cell was increased from 32 to 160 and the whole 2 column table was changed to a lot larger value.  This effect distorted the entire layout of the 2 column page that I am laying out.

What are the limits of this process and what can I do to prevent the table dimensions from being distorted?

The page is referenced to a template, which contains all the css for the page.

The link works OK to go to the desired "anchor" point.

R. Rufer

[Jon Fritz]

If all you have done is add an id to a table cell and it changed the layout of the table, that would typically mean you have the id defined in your css and it's picking up some setting from there.

Do you have a link you could share so we could see the page in question?

[Nancy OShea]

ID selector names cannot start with numbers, only Aa-Zz characters without spaces.

<td id="1"> is not valid.

<td id="one"> is valid.

PS. Tables are for tabular data.  You should be using CSS for layouts.

Nancy O.

[Jessi_the_animator_2014]

Hi Nancy,

I am new to Dreamweaver and I have the cc version, but I have never worked with Dreamweaver, so this is the first time I ever used it.

How do I put it next to a heading?

This is what it looks like this

<p><span class="list_term"> (this is where the front is in the design tab) Reservations</span><br></p></div>

  Our Reservations Department is staffed with five Certified Travel Agents,

    each of whom is eager to assist you in making your travel plans. They have specialty

    areas in Africa, the Caribbean, South America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe,

    Asia, Antarctica, and Hawaii and the South Pacific. They also specialize in

    Senior Travel, Family Travel, Student Travel, and Special Needs Travel. Call

    us at <i>(555) 848-0807</i> extension 75 or e-mail us at <i><a href="mailto:mailbox@tripsmart.com">Reservations</a> </i> to begin making your travel plans now. We will be happy to send you brochures

    and listings of Internet addresses to help you get started. We are open from

    8:00 a.m. until 6:00 p.m. CST.</p>

Please help me! ASAP

[Nancy OShea]

If you want to use a heading as you should for importance, I would change all this:

<p><span class="list_term">Reservations</span><br></p></div>

to this:

<h3 id="reservations" class="list_term">Reservations</h3>

A link to the reservations heading on the same page would look like this:

    <a href="#reservations">Link to Reservations</a>

A link to reservations heading from a different page would look like this:

     <a href="filename.html#reservations">Link to Reservations</a>

Nancy O.

[rogg]

In the HTML5 specification, in section 11.1 Obsolete but conforming features, it states

"Features listed in this section will trigger warnings in conformance checkers"

and

"Authors should not specify the name attribute on a elements. If the attribute is present, its value must not be the empty string and must neither be equal to the value of any of the ID's in the element's home subtree other than the element's own ID, if any, nor be equal to the value of any of the other name attributes on a elements in the element's home subtree. If this attribute is present and the element has an id, then the attribute's value must be equal to the element's id. In earlier versions of the language, this attribute was intended as a way to specify possible targets for fragment identifiers in URLs. The id attribute should be used instead."

Based on what I highlighted in bold above, I substitued id= for name= and the Validator (with the DTD set to XHTML 1.0 Strict) accepts <a id="gohere"></a> as valid; Dreamweaver CC 13.1 accepts <a id="gohere"></a> and displays the anchor symbol. So what I'm using now is:

<a id="gohere"></a>

<p>Text and other stuff etc....

BTW, the Validator also accepts <a name="gohere"></a> as valid. Go figure.

Ron

[hen3ry]

Historically,  I’ve avoided using named anchors, and I think my reasons may extend to the updated "link to ID" method discussed on this thread. 

If I recall correctly, over 5 years ago I did some experiments and determined that positioning on "short"  target pages isn't satisfactory.  The linked-to anchor point may not --cannot?-- be positioned at the top of the page.  (Maybe this has been improved in recent years... if so, please post back with a few words of explanation.)  In such cases, there seems to be no way of directing the visitors attention to the exact target, which I saw as a strong reason to avoid this technique.

A recent reason to re-examine this:  I now need to provide a master glossary page for groups of pages. The referring text should lead directly to the relevant definition in all cases.     Visitors may choose to ignore links on technical terms, to follow links in specific cases, or to visit the glossary page to study multiple terms in parallel.

Fast forward: I found this thread.

- - -

As a greybeard, especially, I understand the point raised by some in this thread:  change IS difficult.  For me, forgetting the old method and now identifying the link target by ID is easy.  I didn't use the old method, and the new one seems logical and forward-looking. 

- - -

From now on, how might a DW user go about managing multiple  link targets in a page?

A basic: seeing the targets.   As I recall, in past versions of DW, one could make named anchors visible in Design View  as a colored shield.   Is this still possible?  Does it apply to the old method of indicating link targets, the new, or both?  I set up test instances of both in a page.  In DW CC, I went to Preferences --> Invisible Elements  and I checked ALL boxes.   Nope,  lots of invisibles now visible, but no corresponding shield for either type of target.  Am I missing something?   Is there another setting? 

If there’s no visibility of IDs in Design View, and DW CC doesn’t offer any other link-target management, some of us can use Code View.  I can see exploring what’s allowed in IDs  (in 4.01 Transitional —what I’m using now— and the future) and coming up with a personal naming standard I can use to make it easier to “see” IDs I intend  as link targets.    Better than nothing, but doesn’t seem particularly efficient.

Generally, this seems like extra trouble and applicable only to people who are  comfortable with Code View.  I get the idea that using named targets has not been strongly supported in the past, and seems on the edge of being deprecated now.     Is that correct?  

Are there a simple alternative methods for achieving the same result?  

TIA

[Nancy OShea]

You can keep using named anchors (manually) in HTML 4 docs.  But they are definitely deprecated in HTML 5 docs.

The linked-to anchor point may not --cannot?-- be positioned at the top of the page.  (Maybe this has been improved in recent years... if so, please post back with a few words of explanation.) 

Nothing has changed.  It all depends on the length of the page and the size of your end-user's screen.

Alternatives:

jQuery scripts.  This one uses jQuery Smooth Scrolling.

http://alt-web.com/TEMPLATES/FixedLayout.shtml

Or, use jQuery Fancybox with Ajax or inline content that appears inside a modal window.

http://fancyapps.com/fancybox/

Nancy O.

[hen3ry]

Nancy O: Thanks for the confirmation that nothing has changed.   Though I'm using HTML 4, I definitely want to be aware of what's coming. 

And thanks for the suggestions!  I'll check those out as long-term alternatives.   It looks like using either will take a bit of study, and an amount of modification yet TBD.   Simple?   I guess I'll find out.