Chapter 5. Links
The humble hyperlink may not raise many eyebrows anymore, but the notion that you can navigate a whole sea of information, jumping from one island of content to another with a simple click, is a relatively recent and powerful phenomenon. Interested in a particular band? Go to Google, type in the band’s name, click to go to its website, click to go to the page that lists its upcoming gigs, click to go to the venue’s website, and click to buy tickets.
Although embedding links is a basic task in building web pages, and even though Dreamweaver—for the most part—shields you from the complexities of doing so, they can be tricky to understand. The following section provides a brief overview of links, including some of the technical distinctions between the different types of links. The rest of the chapter, with sections on formatting the appearance of your links and creating navigation menus, will help turn you into a link-crafting maestro.
Note
If you already understand links, or are just eager to start using Dreamweaver, jump to the tutorial on Removing a Spry menu.
Understanding Links
Links are snippets of code that give web browsers directions to get from one page to another on the Web. What makes links powerful is that the distance covered by those directions doesn’t matter. A link can lead to another page on the same site just as easily as it can lead to a page on a web server halfway around the globe.
Behind the scenes, a simple HTML tag called the anchor tag (<a>) makes ...
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