CREATING SIMPLE WEB PAGES ADDING LINKS TO YOUR WEB PAGES (LESSON :5)

CREATING SIMPLE WEB PAGES

ADDING LINKS TO YOUR WEB PAGES

After finishing yesterday’s lesson, you now have a couple of pages that have some headings, text, and lists in them. These page  are all well and good, but rather boring. The real fun starts when you learn how to create hypertext links and link your pages to the web.

IN THIS LESSON

 Today, you’ll learn just that. Specifically, you’ll learn about the following:

§  All about the HTML link tag <a> and its various parts

§  How to link to other pages on your local disk by using relative and absolute pathnames

§  How to link to other pages on the web by using URLs

§  How to use links and anchors to link to specific places inside pages

§  All about RULs: the various parts of the URL and the kinds of URLs you can use.

CREATING LINKS

The create a link in HTML, you need two things:

The name of the file (or the URL of the file) to which you want to link

§  The text that will serve as the clickable link.

Only the text included within the link tag is actually visible on your of page. When your readers click on the link, the browser loads the URL associated with the link.

THE LINK TAG-<A>

 The create a link in an HTML page, you use the HTML link tag <a>…</a>. the <a> tag often is called an  anchor  because it also can be used to create anchors for links. (you’ll learn more about creating anchors later today.) the most common use of the link tag, however, is to create links to other pages.

Unlike the simple tags you learned about in the preceding lesson, the <a> has some extra features: the opening tag, <a>, includes both the name of the tag <a> and extra information about the link itself. The extra features are called attributes of the tag. (you first discovered attributes in lesson 4, “learning the basics of HTML,” when you learned about lists.) so, rather than the opening <a> tag having just a name inside brackets, it looks something like the following:

<a name=”up” href=”menu.html” title=”the twelve caesars”>

The extra attributes ( in this example, name,  href, and title) describe the link itself, the attribute you’ll probably use most often is the href attribute, which is short for hypertext reference. You use the href attribute to specify the name or URL of the file to which this link points.

Like most HTML tags, the link tag also has a closing tag, </a>. all the text between the opening and closing tags will become the actual link on the screen and be highlighted, underlined, or colored blue or red when the web page is displayed. That’s the text you or your readers will click to follow the link to the URL in the href attribute.

Figure 5.1 shows the parts of a typical link using the <a> tag, including the href, the text of the link, and the closing tag.