I have gone back from scratch in HTML but this time creating my own tutorial as I go along and have covered a few items before right here on this forum before and now I just can't seem to remember and understand the bleepety-bleep-bleep-BLEEP things no matter how many tutorials I read a million times on the net, so really freaking frustrating, my head is about to explode, sorry got to vent somewhere before I run amok!

Ok, [I'm taking a few deep breaths here......], let me start with "linking to a location on the same page", I see the anchors

<a href="#myanchor">Go to anchor</a>
<a name="myanchor">My Anchor</a>

Using my text here as an example, I want to use the word in the first line "gone" to link directly to the word "million" in the 5th line from the top, how do I do this please?

What you're doing is just fine. You may not see any changes with the url in IE7, and if you can view the whole page in the browser window, you won't see any changes in the position of the page. But just for clarification:

I have <a href="#myanchor">gone</a> back from scratch in HTML but this time creating my own tutorial as I go along and have covered a few items before right here on this forum before and now I just can't seem to remember and understand the bleepety-bleep-bleep-BLEEP things no matter how many tutorials I read a <a name="myanchor">million</a> times on the net, so really freaking frustrating, my head is about to explode, sorry got to vent somewhere before I run amok![IMG]http://www.webmaster-talk.com/../images/smilies/mad.gif[/IMG]

- Steve

I have <a href="#million">gone</a> back from scratch in HTML......
...
...
...
read a <a name="million">million</a> times on the net,

Yah.. but don't use the <a name=..."> thing. You can create an anchor with an ID easily, works the same, and it's cleaner.

In your example, I'd do this:

I have <a href="#million">gone</a> back from scratch in HTML......
...
...
...
read a <span id="million">million</span> times on the net,

Semantically correct and it has the added bonus of allowing you to STYLE that with css. I use this method all the time on headings as anchors.

Finally got this right and rewrote it my tutorial so I can understand it next time, thanks guys!

Next, what's the # sign for?

To use the correct terminology, the hash symbol, (#) marks a document fragment.

User agents that are set to handle "bookmarks", will position this fragment (sub-section) at the top of the page when they are encountered on opening a document or when the fragment is "clicked".
In basic terms the page will be scrolled up or down until the bookmarked section is at the top.
If no anchor with a matching name or no element with a matching ID exists in the document, it will be scrolled to the top.

If you want to practice: http://www.w3schools.com/HTML/tryit....link_locations

I thought I saw that # sign being used in other coding? If I am correct then I would think it has a universal meaning and not just connected to the same page link issue or am I mistaken?

In CSS stylesheets it is used to set style rules to be applied to an element referenced by the ID.

The "#" symbol is also used in a few languages to signify a hexadecimal number. In HTML it is used as a prefix for ASCII entities ( eg: & #8482 ; spaces added to stop it becoming ™ )

It doesn't have a universal semantic meaning, just different meanings depending on the context.