ptg1647605290 LESSON 6: Working with Links
Creating Links
To create a link in HTML, you need two things:
n The name of the file (or the URL) to which you want to link
n The text that will serve as the clickable linkOnly the text included within the link tag is actually visible on your page. When your
readers click the link, the browser loads the URL associated with the link.The Link Tag:
To create a link in an HTML page, you use the HTML link tag <a>...</a>. The <a>
tag is also called an anchor tag because it also can be used to create anchors for links.
(You’ll learn more about creating anchors later in this lesson.) The most common use of
the link tag, however, is to create links to other pages.
Unlike the tags you learned about in the preceding lesson, the <a> tag requires attributes
in order to be useful. You’ve seen optional attributes for tags, and attributes like style
that can be used with basically any tag. The <a> tag uses attributes to define the link. So,
rather than the opening <a> tag having just the tag name inside brackets, it looks some-
thing like the following:
<a href="menu.html" title="The Twelve Caesars">
The additional attributes (in this example, href, and title) describe the link itself. The
attribute you’ll probably use most often is the href attribute , which is short for hyper-
text reference. You use the href attribute to specify the name or URL to which this link
points.HTML5 made <a> tags with no attributes valid as placeholder
links for use with CSS and scripts.NOTELike 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 otherwise marked as specified in the page’s style sheet 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 6.1 shows the parts of a typical link using the <a> tag, including the href, the text
of the link, and the closing tag.