... HTML & Webpages ...

... Recommend this series to a friend.

There are five kinds of links as far as I know:

• A link to another part of the page on which you are now working.
• A link to another page of your website.
• A link to another part of a page on your website.
• A link to another website (like mine, for example).
• A link to a particular section on another website (like this html section).

I can't think of any other possibilities; can you? We'll start with linking to another website. And whose site are we going to link to? It's a difficult question; and I'm thinking. How about mine? Let's put a link (it's only for practice) on your page to my site. We'll make one to this very section since it seems to interest you. That's the fifth possibility I listed. So how do we do it? All right, it's no secret. The url (address) of this section, page 1, is:

http://geocities.datacellar.net/buddychai/Html/01.html

What's that, you don't believe me? Try this and see for yourself. You can then highlight the address in the "Location" box (in Netscape) or the "Address" box (IE). I'm impartial here but everyone seems to know that I prefer Netscape.

Let's stop for a moment and look at that url. I must have felt very html'ish as I see it listed twice. I could have named the sub-directory with a different name, and even could have listed the pages as 01.html, 02.html, etc. For the newbies, let's see what that url tells us.

• www ... says it's on the world wide wait web.
• geocities.com ... tells us that geocities is the webspace provider.
• buddychai ... is the particular section (yours truly) in geocities.
• Html ... is the sub-directory these pages are in (you know all about that).
• 01 ... the first page (named "01" to keep a numerical order; it's really page 1).
• .html (dot html) ... that's the extension of the page name telling what kind of a document this is ... a document with hyper-text-markup-language.

No charge for this very secret information and keep it to yourself; "sub rosa" as they say. Now how do we create that link to that page 1 of this section?

<A HREF="http://geocities.datacellar.net/buddychai/Html/01.html">HTML</A>

Copy and paste that into your editor, wherever you think best. You are now gaining some control over the look of your page; where you put any link is entirely up to you. This is a very simple link but it's the basic format. It begins with a <A and it closes with a </A> ... like most tags, they have to have an opening and an ending; something to say (so to speak) what the tag is supposed to do is done.

After you do enough tag writing, you find that it is always the "little things" that'll screw up a tag (and maybe then a page). I've done it a few times just writing these pages now. Leave out a quote sign and the tag is not there, leave out a (/) sign and the entire page takes on a bizarre look. After awhile it is fun seeing a mistake; as soon as you see it, you know exactly what and where the error is ... it's a challenge.

Before we go on, know that a link doesn't sit on a page all by its lonesome. There has to be some text connected explaining what that link is all about (unless it's self explanatory) … some text before the link, or some text after the link, or what I often have because I like to see links centered on a page, silly habit of mine, have text on both sides of the link (even in a paragraph like that "What's that, you don't believe me?" seen earlier on this page. You didn't catch it? ... "this" was the link.