The next command we will discuss is the command which will allow you to put a link to someone else’s page on your page. This feature will also be used to put links on your page to software, images, etc. This command is the A HREF command. In order to use this command you will first need to find another web page, software, an image, or have your page consist of multiple documents. For now we will use my web page’s address, http://computing.net.
When putting a link to other information on the internet you should first and most importantly make sure that the link is correct. I have gone to many pages on the internet that have had incorrect or outdated links and it is very annoying. The second thing that you should do is make sure that the page contains information that is relevant to your web page. For example you don’t want a link to Sun Microsystems on a page about dog psychology, unless your web server is made by Sun but that is another story. Third, you will want to choose a good title for the link. Normally this will be the title of the page, but it could also be a brief description of the page. For example, if you put a link to my page you may want to title the link “Justin Weber’s Computing Center” or you may want to title it “A cool page where one can find some computer help.” The decision on how to title the page is up to you.
The command for the A HREF command is designated by an angle bracket “<“ then the words A HREF then a equal sign “=” then the link that you want to put on your page, let’s say my page for now, “http://computing.net” then an angle bracket “>” then a title for the link then an angle bracket “<“ then a slash “/” then a A then an angle bracket “>”.
If you wanted the title for the link to my web page to be Justin Weber’s Computing Center, the final source code will look like this:
There are modifiers that can be put into the A HREF command that do different things. For example, there are some javascripts that allow a extra command to put a special title in the link location at the bottom. Normally when you hold your mouse over a link the browser will say the location of the link at the bottom, but if you use one of these javascripts it will put whatever you want at the bottom and replace the location. There are probably other javascripts out there that do other unique things with this A HREF command and the javascript will probably explain exactly how to use it with the A HREF command in it’s help file.
It is also probable that you will need to use the A HREF command to link to other sections of your web page. Because of enhancements to HTML throughout it’s existence you do not need to insert the entire address for this. Let’s say the help file on my page is in the same directory as the page that is begin viewed and that the help file is called help.html. I would not need to type http://computing.net/help.html in the A HREF command I would just need to insert help.html:
<A HREF=”help.html”>Help Me!</A>
Basically a link that is on your server has an address relative to your page. Let’s say the windows95 file on my page is in a directory called windows95 and the file is called windows95.html all that I need to insert is:
<A HREF=”windows95/windows95.html>Windows95</A>
Another useful idea is that if you have a link that is in the parent directory to the directory your document is in all you have to do is enter ../ then the title. Let’s say I have a link to the help page on my windows95 page all I need to do to accomplish this is:
<A HREF=”../help.html”>Help Me!</A>
NOTE= If you have links on your page that are not to pages made by you you may want to frequently check them to make sure that they are valid. If they become outdated and you leave them on your page this could generate complaints from people that are viewing your page.
The next command that we will discuss is the command that is used to link to a certain part of a page. Because pages have been getting larger there is a need to be able to have links to certain parts of them. For example if you had a page that was 1000 lines long and on another page you wanted to have a link to the subject in the last 10 lines if would not be desired to put a link to the top of the page (where a default link with the A HREF command would go) but it would be preferable to put a link to just that section of that page.
In order to do this you would need to put a command on the page that you want the link to go to telling the browser the name of that section of the page and where that section starts. You can have multiple sections on a page but I will just talk about having one section. First you must scroll down to the section in the source code where you want the named section to be. After you have done that you would then enter the name of that section. We will name this section Test. In order to name the section a command must be entered. This command is an angle bracket “<“ followed by the letters A NAME followed by an equal sign “=” followed by the name of the section followed by an angle bracket “>”. This name will not be apparent when looking at the document in a browser and will only be used if the browser is told to look for that name on that page. The final source code for the name of the section would look like this:
