# What's the use of the hashtag # (number sign) in the links? > Understand what the hashtag in HTML links means, from the href placeholder to fragment links that jump to an element with a matching id on the same page. Author: [Flavio Copes](https://flaviocopes.com/about/) | Published: 2022-04-17 | Topics: [HTML](https://flaviocopes.com/tags/html/) | Canonical: https://flaviocopes.com/html-hashtag-in-links/ While working on a Web page you might see a link that's like this: ```html features ``` `href="#"` here is a placeholder. The link will not point to anything in particular. Sometimes it means the app is in progress, and we'll fill that link `href` attribute later on. Other times you'll see this: ```html features ``` In this case the link references a point in the same page. You'll have an element like this: ```html Features ``` It can also be an empty element, which will be there, but hidden: ```html ``` Notice we used `id` here. Clicking the ```html features ``` item will bring to the `` with the `id` equal to `features`. To complete this description, if the link is ```html features ``` clicking this the browser will open on a separate URL. You can also combine those, so ```html features ``` will open the `/features` URL, and will scroll to the `` tag with `id="first"`.