Understanding Links
Power of HTML comes from its ability to link regions of text and images to another document. Browser highlights these regions (usually with color blue and underlines) to indicate that they are hypertext links.
Every link has two parts:
- First part is a link source - the actual text (or graphic) that appears on the page to represent the link. When visitors click the link source they activate the invisible URL.
- The second part is the invisible URL, which describes the page, file, or Internet service to be accessed when the link is clicked.
Creating links is a simple matter of choosing a spot on the page for the link (first part) and then supplying an URL for it (second part). You can use any words or phrases in your page as links.
Link paths
Each Web page has a unique address, called a Uniform Resource Locator (URL). However, when you create a local link (a link from one document to another on the same site), you generally don't specify the entire URL of the document you're linking to; instead, you specify a relative path from the current document or from the site's root folder. The following are the three types of link paths:
Absolute paths (such as http://www.mysite.com/support/mypages/contents.html).
Absolute paths provide the complete URL of the linked document, including the protocol to use (usually http:// for Web pages). For example, http://www.mysite.com/support/mypages/contents.html is an absolute path. You must use an absolute path to link to a document on another server. You can also use absolute-path links for local links (to documents in the same site), but that approach is discouraged; if you move the site to another domain, all of your local absolute-path links will break. Also, using relative paths for local links provides greater flexibility if you need to move files within your site.
Document-relative paths (such as mypages/contents.html).
Document-relative paths are the most appropriate paths to use for local links in most Web sites. They're particularly useful when the current document and the linked document are in the same folder and are likely to remain together. You can also use a document-relative path to link to a document in another folder, by specifying the path through the folder hierarchy from the current document to the linked document. The basic concept behind document-relative paths is to omit the part of the absolute URL that is the same for both the current document and the linked document, providing only the portion of the path that differs.
- To link to another file in the same folder as the current document, simply enter the file name.
- To link to a file in a subfolder of the current document's folder, provide the name of the subfolder, then a forward slash (/), and then the file name.
- To link to a file in the parent folder of the current document's folder, precede the file name with ../ (where ".." means "up one level in the folder hierarchy").
Root-relative paths (such as /support/mypages/contents.html).
Root-relative paths provide the path from the site's root folder to a document. You might want to use these types of paths if you are working on a large Web site that uses several servers, or one server that hosts several different sites. However, if you are not familiar with this type of path, you may want to stick to document-relative paths. A root-relative path begins with a leading forward slash, which stands for the site root folder. For example, /support/tips.html is a root-relative path to a file (tips.html) in the support subfolder of the site's root folder.
Relative Links versus Absolute Pathnames
In general, you should use relative links, because they are shorter and it is easier to move group of documents to another location, because relative path names will still be valid. Use absolute pathnames when linking to documents that are not directly related.
What can be linked
A link can point to any resource that has an URL. That includes Web pages, pictures, email messages, FTP servers, etc.
Web Pages
Links with absolute path, which are pointing to Web pages always begin with protocol designator http://. The protocol is followed by the Web server host name, the directory path to the page file, and the actual HTML file of the page, as follows: http://servername/directoryname/file.HTM
Bookmarks
A link can point to a specific location within a Web page - even to a specific location within the same page containing the link. These locations are called bookmarks (or anchors). You can add a bookmark to your Web page and then link to this bookmark from elsewhere in the same page or from other pages.
To link to a bookmark in a web page
Place a pound mark (#) after file name, and type the bookmark name. For example, the URL: http://www.myserver.com/index.htm#bookmark1
points to a bookmark named bookmark1 in a file called index.htm on a server called www.myserver.com.
Other services
In addition to Web pages and their bookmarks, links can point to any other browser-accessible services. Unfortunately not all browsers can access all of these services. |
