Summary

Today, you learned all about links. Links turn the Web from a collection of unrelated pages into an enormous, interrelated information system (there are those big words again).

To create links, you use the <a>...</a> tag pair, called the link or anchor tag. The anchor tag has attributes for creating links (the HRef attribute) and anchor names (the name attribute).

When linking pages that are all stored on the local disk, you can specify their pathnames in the href attribute as relative or absolute paths. For local links, relative pathnames are preferred because they enable you to move local pages more easily to another directory or to another system. If you use absolute pathnames, your links will break if you change anything in the hard-coded path.

If you want to link to a page on the Web (a remote page), the value of the HRef attribute is the URL of that page. You can easily copy the URL of the page you want to link. Just go to that page by using your favorite web browser, and then copy and paste the URL from your browser into the appropriate place in your link tag.

To create links to specific parts of a page, set an anchor at the point you want to link to, use the <a>...</a> tag as you would with a link, but rather than the HRef attribute, you use the name attribute to name the anchor. You then can link directly to that anchor name by using the name of the page, a hash sign (#), and the anchor name.

Finally, URLs (uniform resource locators) are used to point to pages, files, and other information on the Internet. Depending on the type of information, URLs can contain several parts, but most contain a protocol type and location or address. URLs can be used to point to many kinds of information but are most commonly used to point to web pages (http), FTP directories or files (ftp), electronic mail addresses (mailto), or Usenet news (news).