Anchor

Anchors make links. But why is it called "anchor"? In HTML, most tags have fairly descriptive names except some of the really old ones which are usually abbreviated like b for bold and p for paragraph. Ok, we can get on board with the abbreviations, but why does "anchor" mean to link?

In the very early days of the web, the concept of "linking" between documents was one of the primary reasons Tim Berners-Lee invented the idea of websites. It was called "hyper-linking" back then, which is also why the HT in HTML stands for "hyper-text" because the text could be interacted with (clicked) to link to other bodies of related text. It sounds so basic and obvious now but this was a novel idea at the time. One of the main ideas of "anchors" back then (and still now) was to scroll you up or down to other parts of the same document. Have you ever been on an FAQ page and they might have links at the top and when you click on one it doesn't go to a new page, it just scrolls you down to the answer? That was (and still is) called "anchoring".

I'm not sure why <link> wasn't used for this instead, but there is a <link> tag. A few years after the web was created in the mid 90s CSS was created. Around that time, <link> was added to the spec so we could "link" to CSS documents. But this isn't a link you click on, it's a "meta tag" which means it's there to help the document work behind the scenes to do something. In this case, download your CSS file.