HELP - Lesson 6 Page 1

Hyperlinks

Stop for a moment and ask why the web is called the web.
Answer - it is a huge collection of pages linked to other pages, without a linear structure - just like a spider's web.
The concept of clicking something on a web page to take you to another place on the web, whether somewhere else on the same page, or a completely different web site, is called Hyperlinking and is a fundamental part of the structure of a web page.

The A tag

Creating a hyperlink is done with the A (anchor) tag. The anchor tag, when surrounding either text or an image, causes that text to become clickable, as well as changing its colour.
Therefore <a>Click Me</a> will cause the words Click Me to appear on the web page in a clickable form - like this :  Click Me.
As our trial above contained no instruction what to do when clicked, nothing happens when you click it.

Making a link to another web page

To make a clickable link to a new page called page2.htm add this to your web page :
<a href="page2.htm">Click Me</a>
This uses the href attribute to designate where to go when clicked. It can be a simple page name, as above, or a fully qualified url to another web site, such as http://www.ehtml.com
When the page is on your current web site, it is not necessary to use the whole domain name.
When the page is on an external web site, then the full url, including the http:// must be specified.

Making a link to the same web page

When the link is to another part of the current web page, you can use
<a href="#footnote">Click Me</a> where footnote is a name which you have designated to a point elsewhere in the text using the
<a name="footnote"> element. This special use of the A element does not require a closing tag, but you may like to put one in anyway.


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