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Anchors and Links (1)

Anchors are the parts of a Web page - usually blue and underlined - that, when selected, immediately take the reader to somewhere else. Anchor tags (<A>..</A>) have a prime attribute called an HREF (or Hypertext REFerence) used at the start of a link, and a secondary NAME attribute used at the link's destination. Both attributes must have a shared character-value such as name or filename, known as a URL (or Uniform Resource Locator).

In its simplest format, where both start and destination of the link are within the same document, the URL of the HREF attribute is preceded by a #sign. For example the next anchor is composed as <A HREF="#sources">additional sources</A> and enables immediate transfer to the other end of this document (being the point where the other half of the link is anchored and composed as <A NAME="sources"></A>).

"Addresses of additional sources can be found at the end of this chapter."

Blah blah blah....

This is somewhere else! Press your "BACK" button to return..

Blah blah blah....

And finally, some additional sources of information...

Blah blah blah!

The URL format (described at the beginning of this document) permits almost any resource on the Internet to be addressed, whether that resource is an HTML file on a Web server or some other Internet resource, such as a gopher server or a Usenet newsgroup.

If the destination-link is another HTML-document in the same directory as the document with the starting-link, then the HREF need only state the filename, and not the complete path to the directory. For example:

Click here to jump to next exercise-file because there's no more in this one!