Linking Documents Together

Once you've got a formatted document in HTML with nice headings and lists and in-lined images, all you need is to add the "hypertext" part. Perhaps surprisingly, this is done using a single additional HTML tag: the anchor tag.

A typical anchor tag looks something like this:

<a href="http://www.trinity.edu/general_index.html">Trinity University</a>

and will be rendered by a typical browser like this:

Trinity University

The "href=..." stuff inside the opening anchor tag is called an attribute of the tag. In this case the value of the href attribute is a URL, or Uniform Resource Locator, which is essentially the Web address of the document you'd like to link to. The stuff between the opening and closing anchor tags is what will be highlighted and "clickable" when rendered by a browser.

For More Information

There's a good introductory section on anchor tags in A Beginner's Guide to HTML plus a separate document A Beginner's Guide to URLs, both recommended reading.

Author: Jim McDonald <jim@engr.trinity.edu>
Last modified: Thu Jul 20 22:56:50 1995