Summary

In this chapter, we've learned all about the different ways of linking between documents on the Web while adding to our Cornflakes at Midnight site. We started off with the simplest method – HTML anchors (<a> tags), showing how they can be used to organize individual web pages into sites.

Next, we learned how these pages can be arranged into folder structures, just like files on your local machine. This allows structure to be added to sites, making them more maintainable, and provides the basis for linking to other sites. We then saw how default documents can be used within websites to remove the need for typing in full paths to files, making it possible for us to navigate to sites such as http://www.wrox.com without needing to know that the actual file being displayed is default.htm.

Having seen how hyperlinks are formed and used, we started looking at more useful topics including learning how pop-up links can be used to allow a visitor to a site view extra information without losing their place on the current page.

After that, we covered more technical topics – the way that web servers process different types of file depending on their file extension, and the way that web browsers treat files differently depending on the MIME type that is returned to them by the server. Continuing with technical topics, we learned how a HyperLink control can be used to dynamically change the page that is being linked to, the text that is displayed to the user, and so on. Our last section on server-side code then looked at how we can pass information from one page to the next, how that can be retrieved on the page being linked to, and how this allows us to add far more functionality to a website, such as drill-downs from search-results.

Next, we saw that hyperlinks don't just have to be used for linking to other web pages; they can be used for sending e-mails, running JavaScript, or connecting to any number of other systems using different protocols such as FTP and HTTPS. Finally, we saw how links can be used within a web page so that resources such as JavaScript and CSS definitions can be shared across pages – saving time, and making site maintenance simpler.