Is the anchor part of a URL being sent to a web server?

Question

Say, there\'s a URL http://www.example.com/#hello

1. Should #hello thing be sent to the web server or not, according to standards?

Answer 1

The hash variables aren't sent to the web server at all.

For instance, a request to http://www.whatismyip.org/#test from Firefox sends the follow HTTP request packet

GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: www.whatismyip.org
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.2.3) Gecko/20100401 Firefox/3.6.3
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 115
Connection: keep-alive
Cache-Control: max-age=0

You'll notice the # is nowhere to be found. Pages you see using # as a form of navigation are doing so through javascript. This parameter is accessible though the window.location.hash variable