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ptg16476052

98 LESSON 6: Working with Links

I can explain this better with an example. Let’s say that your site consists of two sections,

/stuff and /things. If you want to link from the file index.html in /stuff to

history.html in /stuff (or any other file in /stuff), you use a relative link. That way,

you can move the /stuff directory around without breaking any of the internal links. On

the other hand, if you want to create a link in /stuff/index.html to /things/

index.html, an absolute link is probably called for. That way, if you move /stuff to

/more/stuff, your link will still work.

The rule of thumb I generally use is that if pages are part of the same collection, I use

relative links, and if they’re part of different collections, I use absolute links.

Links to Other Documents on the Web

So , now you have a whole set of pages on your local disk, all linked to each other. In

some places in your pages, however, you want to refer to a page somewhere else on

the Internet—for example, to The First Caesars page by Dr. Ellis Knox at Boise State

University for more information on the early Roman emperors. You also can use the link

tag to link those other pages on the Internet, which I’ll call remote pages. Remote pages

are contained somewhere on the Web other than the system on which you’re currently

working.

The HTML code you use to link pages on the Web looks exactly the same as the code

you use for links between local pages. You still use the <a> tag with an href attribute,

and you include some text to serve as the link on your web page. Rather than a filename

or a path in the href, however, you use the URL of that page on the Web, as Figure 6.5

shows.

URL of remote file

Closing tag

<A HREF="http://www.cern.ch/">Cern Home Page</A>

Opening tag

FIGURE 6.5

Link to remote

files.