Hyperlinks:
Introduction and Linking to External Sites
One of the primary reasons for the Internet was to be able to easily reference research when citing others, with an ability to directly “link” to their work.
In computing, a hyperlink, or simply a link, is a reference to data that the reader can directly follow either by clicking, tapping, or hovering. A hyperlink points to a whole document or to a specific element within a document. Hypertext is text with hyperlinks. The text that is linked is called anchor text. A software system that is used for viewing and creating hypertext is a hypertext system, and to create a hyperlink is to hyperlink (or simply to link). A user following hyperlinks is said to navigate or browse the hypertext. [1]
Using Links
With links being such a basic and historical part of the Internet, they also have a very simple tag; <a>...</a>. Any text between a hyperlink element’s tags will display as “hypertext”. Traditionally, this has been blue, underlined text, visually signifying to the user that the text is a link.
In order to link to another document, the author must include a hyper-reference attribute within the opening tag. This attribute is signified with href="".
A Word About Style
Link text should be specific about where the user will be going if they click a link. This means that links should not be simple text such as “Click Me!” Instead, good style would dictate that the link text be a description of the site, name, or information that informs the user.
Opening Links in a New Window
The target attribute provides us a way of specifying to a browser that a link should be opened in a new window.
In this case, the attributes value should be set to "_blank".
External: Links to Other Sites
If you remember from Topic-02, links that include the “http/https” as part of the entire URL are known as absolute URLs.
Notice in the above link that it includes “https”. The “https” is required to signify to the browser that this is an ‘external’ link outside of the current document’s directory/server. You must include either “http” or “https”.
The former is a older, established, version of the “hypertext transfer protocol”, which specified how data was sent between clients. The latter, is a “secure” version of this protocol. Whenever possible, you should provide “https” links (just check that they work first), as it provides a safer browsing experience.
A very common type of hyperlinking is to create an e-mail link within a page. This is accomplished by prepending “mailto:” to the desired e-mail address. So, to create a hyperlink that e-mails me:
Clicking on such a link in a webpage will cause the webpage to try and open the users default e-mail application.
For this reason, it is also good practice to write the full e-mail address out. That way a user can easily copy the address from the browser into the e-mail client of their choice.
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Read pages 74-79 of Chapter 04 in Duckett.