When I make links, some of them are blue and some of them are purple. Why? How come most of the links I see on the Internet aren't blue and purple?
A1:
By default, a link appears blue to anyone who hasn't recently visited the page to which it points. After you visit a page, any links to it turn purple. These default colors can be (and often are) changed to match any color scheme a web page author wants, so many links you see on the Web won't be blue and purple. You can even change the size, weight, and other font characteristics of links using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). (Hour 9, "Custom Backgrounds and Colors," tells how to change the colors of text on your web pages using CSS, and Hour 13, "Digging Deeper into Style Sheet Formatting," shows you how to alter the color and appearance of links.)
Q2:
What happens if I link to a page on the Internet and then the person who owns that page deletes or moves it?
A2:
That depends on how that person has set up his server computer. Usually, people see a message saying page not found or something to that effect when they click the link. They can still click the Back button to return to your page.
Q3:
One of my links works fine on my computer, but when I put the pages on the Internet it doesn't work anymore. What's up?
A3:
These are the most likely culprits:
Capitalization problems. On Windows computers, linking to a file named Freddy.html with <a href="freddy.html"> will work. On most web servers (which are often UNIX machines), the link must be <a href="freddy.html"> (or you must change the name of the file to freddy.html). To make matters worse, some text editors and file transfer programs actually change the capitalization without telling you! The best solution is to stick with all-lowercase filenames for web pages.
Spaces in filenames. Most web servers don't allow filenames with spaces. For example, you should never name a web page my page.html. Instead, call it mypage.html or maybe my_page.html with an underscore instead of a space.
Local absolute addresses. If for some reason you link to a file using a local absolute address, such as C:\mywebsite\news.html, the link won't work when you place the file on the Internet. You should never use local absolute addresses; when this occurs it is usually an accident caused from a temporary link created just to test part of a page. So, be careful to remove any test links like this before publishing a page on the Web.
The next hour explains how to upload files to a web site and how to rename files after they're online so that you can make sure that the spelling and capitalization are perfect.
