Creating Hyperlinks
Use the HTML/XHTML <a>
tag to create links to other documents and to name anchors for fragment
indentifiers within documents.
The <a> Tag
You will use the <a>
tag most commonly with its href
attribute to create a hypertext link, or hyperlink, to another place in the same
document or to another document. In these cases, the current document
is the source of the link; the value of the href
attribute, a URL, is the
target.[*]
The other way you can use the <a>
tag is with the name
attribute, to mark a hyperlink target, or fragment identifier, in a
document. This method, although part of the HTML 4 and XHTML
standards, is slowly succumbing to the id
attribute, which lets you mark nearly any
element, including paragraphs, divisions, forms, and so on, as a
hyperlink target.
The standards let you use both the name
and href
attributes within a single <a>
tag, defining a link to another document and a fragment identifier within the current document. We recommend against this because it overloads a single tag with multiple functions and some browsers may not be able to handle it. Instead, use two ...
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