Creating A Hypertext Link
Welcome to day four. Today you will learn only one thing: How to create a link to another page. It's a set tag format like any of the others you have seen so far. Once you learn the format, you can make as many links as you want to any other page you want.
Now an example: What is below would create a link to the HTML Goodies home page.
<A HREF="http://www.htmlgoodies.com">Click Here For HTML Goodies</A>
Here's What's Happening
* A stands for Anchor. It begins the link to another page.
* HREF stands for Hypertext REFerence. That's a nice, short way of saying to the browser, "This is where the link is going to go."
*
HTML Goodies is the FULL ADDRESS of the link. Also notice that the address has an equal sign in front of it and is enclosed in quotes. Why? Because it's an attribute of the Anchor tag, a command inside of a command. Remember that from Primer #3?
* Where it reads "Click Here For HTML Goodies" is where you write the text you want to appear on the page. What is in that space will appear on the page for the viewer to click. So, write something that denotes the link.
* /A ends the entire link command.
Now, without clicking, simply lay your pointer on the blue words. You'll see the address of the link you created come up along the bottom of the browser window, down where it usually reads "Document Done".
What To Write For The Link?
There are a couple different schools of thought on this. One suggests that what you write for links should be quite blatant. This includes text like "Click here for this" or "Here's a link to...". The other states that since the hypertext links will be blue (or whatever color they're set to), that the links should be just another word in the text set up as a link.
In reality it depends what you're doing. If you're building a menu bar down the side of your page (like down the left hand side of this page) then the last thing you want is for every single link to say "Click here for HTML Primer 1 - an introduction" - simply because your menu would be as wide as your page...
However, for accessibility reasons you should try to make sure your links make sense out of context - diasbled people navigating your page can jump around hyperlinks using the "tab" key (there should be one on the left of your keyboard too). If the have skipped directly to your hyperlink which says "here" then they won't know what it's about.
Creating A Hypertext Link
Linear Mode
