How to go to a specific element on page?

On my HTML page, I want to be able to 'go to' / 'scroll to' / 'focus on' an element on the page.

Normally, I'd use an anchor tag with a href="#something", but I'm already using the hashchange event along with the BBQ plugin to load this page.

So is there any other way, via JavaScript, to have the page go to a given element on the page?

Here's the basic outline of what I'm trying to do:

function focusOnElement(element_id) {
     $('#div_' + element_id).goTo(); // need to 'go to' this element
}

<div id="div_element1">
   yadda yadda 
</div>
<div id="div_element2">
   blah blah
</div>

<span onclick="focusOnElement('element1');">Click here to go to element 1</span>
<span onclick="focusOnElement('element2');">Click here to go to element 2</span>

If the element is currently not visible on the page, you can use the native scrollIntoView() method.

$('#div_' + element_id)[0].scrollIntoView( true );

Where true means align to the top of the page, and false is align to bottom.

Otherwise, there's a scrollTo() plugin for jQuery you can use.

Or maybe just get the top position()^(docs) of the element, and set the scrollTop()^(docs) to that position:

var top = $('#div_' + element_id).position().top;
$(window).scrollTop( top );

The standard technique in plugin form would look something like this:

(function($) {
    $.fn.goTo = function() {
        $('html, body').animate({
            scrollTop: $(this).offset().top + 'px'
        }, 'fast');
        return this; // for chaining...
    }
})(jQuery);

Then you could just say $('#div_element2').goTo(); to scroll to <div id="div_element2">. Options handling and configurability is left as an exercise for the reader.

document.getElementById("elementID").scrollIntoView();

Same thing, but wrapping it in a function:

function scrollIntoView(eleID) {
   var e = document.getElementById(eleID);
   if (!!e && e.scrollIntoView) {
       e.scrollIntoView();
   }
}

This even works in an IFrame on an iPhone.

Example of using getElementById: http://www.w3schools.com/jsref/tryit.asp?filename=tryjsref_document_getelementbyid

here is a simple javascript for that

call this when you need to scroll the screen to an element which has id="yourSpecificElementId"

window.scroll(0,findPos(document.getElementById("yourSpecificElementId")));

and you need this function for the working:

//Finds y value of given object
function findPos(obj) {
	var curtop = 0;
	if (obj.offsetParent) {
		do {
			curtop += obj.offsetTop;
		} while (obj = obj.offsetParent);
	return [curtop];
	}
}

the screen will be scrolled to your specific element.

To scroll to a specific element on your page, you can add a function into your jQuery(document).ready(function($){...}) as follows:

$("#fromTHIS").click(function () {
    $("html, body").animate({ scrollTop: $("#toTHIS").offset().top }, 500);
    return true;
});

It works like a charm in all browsers. Adjust the speed according to your need.