I have a link on a long HTML page. When I click it, I wish a div on another part of the page to be visible in the window by scrolling into view.

A bit like EnsureVisible in other languages.

I've checked out scrollTop and scrollTo but they seem like red herrings.

Can anyone help?

16 Answers 16


old question, but if anyone finds this through google (as I did) and who does not want to use anchors or jquery; there's a builtin javascriptfunction to 'jump' to an element;


and what's even better; according to the great compatibility-tables on quirksmode, this is supported by all major browsers!

  • 2
    Not a smooth scroll at all (at least on Firefox) but it works, with one line of code, with no third-party stuff. Nice. – MatrixFrog Aug 12 '10 at 21:57
  • The problem with built-in scroll into view is that when looking at a long page, user may get lost when you scroll the page. I've written an animated version of this functionality that scrolls the container only when needed and does that with animation so user can actually see what happened. It can also run a complete function afterwards. It's similar to scrollTo jQuery plugin with the exception that you don't have to provide scrollable ancestor. It looks for it automatically. – Robert Koritnik May 2 '11 at 15:37
  • 3
    @Robert, that sounds fantastic. Can you provide a link or perhaps provide an answer that includes the code? – Kirk Woll May 29 '11 at 20:05
  • The simplicity of this is awesome. – MeanMatt Aug 29 '12 at 5:02
  • 4
    For people looking for animation or smooth scroll: document.getElementById('#something').scrollIntoView({ behavior: 'smooth', block: 'center' }); – Khalil Laleh Nov 20 '18 at 9:33

If you don't want to add an extra extension the following code should work with jQuery.

        var target = $('a[name=target]');
        if (target.length)
            var top = target.offset().top;
            $('html,body').animate({scrollTop: top}, 1000);
            return false;

How about the JQuery ScrollTo - see this sample code

  • 24
    Is JQuery not javascript or do we want to write all libraries from scratch? My reading of the question was how to implement a specific feature, perhaps he wanted to know technical details but you don't know that any more than I do. – George Mauer Feb 23 '10 at 16:59
  • 4
    @BjornTipling - if he wanted to see the JavaScript here it is demos.flesler.com/jquery/scrollTo/js/jquery.scrollTo-min.js – Norman H Aug 10 '12 at 15:20
<a href="#myAnchorALongWayDownThePage">Click here to scroll</a>

<A name='myAnchorALongWayDownThePage"></a>

No fancy scrolling but it should take you there.

  • The question asked for javascript to accomplish the same thing. – Scott Swezey Sep 16 '08 at 0:21
  • 3
    Check Peter Boughton's answer in stackoverflow.com/questions/66964 - giving the div an id instead of using named anchors works the same, but has much better semantic meaning and requires less markup. – nickf Sep 16 '08 at 0:21
  • as scott s pointed out below: document.location.hash="myAnchor"; – Aaron Watters Oct 23 '09 at 18:56

You can use Element.scrollIntoView() method as was mentioned above. If you leave it with no parameters inside you will have an instant ugly scroll. To prevent that you can add this parameter - behavior:"smooth".


document.getElementById('scroll-here-plz').scrollIntoView({behavior: "smooth", block: "start", inline: "nearest"});

Just replace scroll-here-plz with your div or element on a website. And if you see your element at the bottom of your window or the position is not what you would have expected, play with parameter block: "". You can use block: "start", block: "end" or block: "center".

Remember: Always use parameters inside an object {}.

If you would still have problems, go to https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Element/scrollIntoView

There is detailed documentation for this method.


The difficulty with scrolling is that you may not only need to scroll the page to show a div, but you may need to scroll inside scrollable divs on any number of levels as well.

The scrollTop property is a available on any DOM element, including the document body. By setting it, you can control how far down something is scrolled. You can also use clientHeight and scrollHeight properties to see how much scrolling is needed (scrolling is possible when clientHeight (viewport) is less than scrollHeight (the height of the content).

You can also use the offsetTop property to figure out where in the container an element is located.

To build a truly general purpose "scroll into view" routine from scratch, you would need to start at the node you want to expose, make sure it's in the visible portion of it's parent, then repeat the same for the parent, etc, all the way until you reach the top.

One step of this would look something like this (untested code, not checking edge cases):

function scrollIntoView(node) {
  var parent = node.parent;
  var parentCHeight = parent.clientHeight;
  var parentSHeight = parent.scrollHeight;
  if (parentSHeight > parentCHeight) {
    var nodeHeight = node.clientHeight;
    var nodeOffset = node.offsetTop;
    var scrollOffset = nodeOffset + (nodeHeight / 2) - (parentCHeight / 2);
    parent.scrollTop = scrollOffset;
  if (parent.parent) {

This worked for me


Answer posted here - same solution to your problem.

Edit: the JQuery answer is very nice if you want a smooth scroll - I hadn't seen that in action before.


Why not a named anchor?

  • Heh... i started to post a JavaScript solution, and then read yours... and slapped myself. Nice job! :-) – Shog9 Sep 16 '08 at 0:21

The property you need is location.hash. For example:

location.hash = 'top'; //would jump to named anchor "top

I don't know how to do the nice scroll animation without the use of dojo or some toolkit like that, but if you just need it to jump to an anchor, location.hash should do it.

(tested on FF3 and Safari 3.1.2)

  • 1
    Great simple solution... also works with IE6 and IE8 (not tested with IE7) – ckarras Dec 7 '09 at 19:54
  • 2
    This is by far the best answer; it's simple, reliable, and requires no library. +1 – user1720624 Jan 13 '14 at 16:59

I can't add a comment to futtta's reply above, but for a smoother scroll use:

onClick="document.getElementById('more').scrollIntoView({block: 'start', behavior: 'smooth'});"
  • Works perfect in Chrome. Thanks! – Al Belmondo Jan 4 '19 at 15:33

scrollTop (IIRC) is where in the document the top of the page is scrolled to. scrollTo scrolls the page so that the top of the page is where you specify.

What you need here is some Javascript manipulated styles. Say if you wanted the div off-screen and scroll in from the right you would set the left attribute of the div to the width of the page and then decrease it by a set amount every few seconds until it is where you want.

This should point you in the right direction.

Additional: I'm sorry, I thought you wanted a separate div to 'pop out' from somewhere (sort of like this site does sometimes), and not move the entire page to a section. Proper use of anchors would achieve that effect.


There is a jQuery plugin for the general case of scrolling to a DOM element, but if performance is an issue (and when is it not?), I would suggest doing it manually. This involves two steps:

  1. Finding the position of the element you are scrolling to.
  2. Scrolling to that position.

quirksmode gives a good explanation of the mechanism behind the former. Here's my preferred solution:

function absoluteOffset(elem) {
    return elem.offsetParent && elem.offsetTop + absoluteOffset(elem.offsetParent);

It uses casting from null to 0, which isn't proper etiquette in some circles, but I like it :) The second part uses window.scroll. So the rest of the solution is:

function scrollToElement(elem) {


  • you forgot to set the first parameter-- window.scroll(0,absoluteOffset(elem)); – Richard Nov 11 '12 at 6:08

I personally found Josh's jQuery-based answer above to be the best I saw, and worked perfectly for my application... of course, I was already using jQuery... I certainly wouldn't have included the whole jQ library just for that one purpose.


EDIT: OK... so mere seconds after posting this, I saw another answer just below mine (not sure if still below me after an edit) that said to use:


This works perfectly and in so much less code than the jQuery version! I had no idea that there was a built-in function in JS called .scrollIntoView(), but there it is! So, if you want the fancy animation, go jQuery. Quick n' dirty... use this one!


For smooth scroll this code is useful

$('a[href*=#scrollToDivId]').click(function() {
      var target = $(this.hash);
      var head_height = $('.header').outerHeight(); // if page has any sticky header get the header height else use 0 here
      if (target.length) {
          scrollTop: target.offset().top - head_height
        }, 1000);
        return false;

Correct me if I'm wrong but I'm reading the question again and again and still think that Angus McCoteup was asking how to set an element to be position: fixed.

Angus McCoteup, check out http://www.cssplay.co.uk/layouts/fixed.html - if you want your DIV to behave like a menu there, have a look at a CSS there

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