Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on 01/21/07 14:47

Scripsit proden@planet.nl:

> I have a website with some name anchors in it, like <a
> href="#mp3">Mp3s</a>

That's not a name anchor. It's a link that refers to an element in the same
document using a fragment identifier, which _might_ be defined using a name
anchor (<a name=...>...</a>) or using an id="..." attribute.

> The problem is that my error reporting system with a certain
> regularity reports about people trying to reach for example:
> http://www.mysite.com/mydir/cmb.htm%23mp3.

Really? So where is the URL of your site? I am actually rather sure that you
gave a forged URL. Yes, it's forged, because it's intentionally wrong,
incorrect by fabrication. The URL http://www.mysite.com/mydir/cmb.htm gives
a 404 error message, but it's a URL under control of the mysite.com domain.

If you don't want to reveal the real URL, i.e. if you don't want to be
helped, at least use the .example convention to indicate a fictitious URL
that is guaranteed not to coincide with a real URL.

> As the referring page
> mentioned is the page itself and the browser mentioned is just IE or
> Mozilla I am wondering what is causing this problem.

The odds are that you have a badly written link on your page.

> One of the options is that it might have to do with my charset utf-8.

The character "#" has the same representation in UTF-8 as in ASCII, ISO 8859
encodings, and many more. But of course if your page isn't _actually_ UTF-8
encoded though declared to be, or vice versa, which is not very uncommon,
anything may happen.

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

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