The Background
In 1997 Sun Microsystems and Jakob Nielson, the noted web design and usability guru, were granted a patent on a "Method and system for implementing hypertext scroll attributes" by the US Patent Office. The patent describes the process of using a string to define an external anchor for an HTML document. The string is defined in the link to the HTML document, and the web browser, on loading the document defined by the link, will scroll to the first occurrence of the text string within the document -- hardly an innovation.
The first sign that this, like

