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L
inks are the Web. Everything else about the medium can be repli-
cated 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 vari-
ous 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, every-
thing 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 is read as one
unit. A generic URL using all the parts looks like this:
scheme://server:port/path/file#anchor
Establishing Web Links
IN TH ...