Adobe® Dreamweaver® CS5 Bible

Chapter 9. Establishing Web Links

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Learning about Internet addresses

• Linking Web pages

• Dreamweaver Technique: Linking to Files

• Pointing to a file

• Creating anchors within Web pages

• Dreamweaver Technique: Inserting anchors

• Targeting URLs

Links are the Web. Everything else about the medium can be replicated in another form, but without links, there would be no World Wide Web. As your Web design work becomes more sophisticated, you'll find additional uses for links: sending mail, connecting to an FTP site — even downloading software.

In this chapter, you learn how Dreamweaver helps you manage various types of links, as well as how to set anchors within documents to get smooth and accurate navigation, and establish targets for your links. To give you a full picture of the possibilities, this chapter begins with an overview of Internet addresses, called URLs.

Understanding URLs

URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator. An awkward phrase, it is one that, nonetheless, describes itself well — the URL's function is to provide a standard method for finding anything on the Internet. From Web pages to newsgroups to the smallest graphic on the most esoteric of pages, everything can be referenced through the URL mechanism.

A typical URL for a Web page can have up to six different parts. Each part is separated by some combination of a slash, colon, and hash-mark delimiter. When entered as an attribute's value, the entire URL is generally enclosed within quotation marks to ensure that the address ...