Beginning ASP.NET 3.5: In C# and VB

7.1. Different Ways to Move around Your Site

The most common way to let a user move from one page to another is by using the <a> element. This element has an href attribute that allows you to define the address of a page or other resource you want to link to. Between the tags you can place the content you want to link, such as text, an image, or other HTML. The following snippet shows a simple example of the <a> element:

<a href="Login.aspx">You can log in here</a>

With this code in a web page, users, after clicking the text "You can log in here," will be taken to the page Login.aspx that should be in the same folder as the page that contains the link.

The <a> element has a server-side counterpart called the HyperLink, which can be created in the markup using <asp:HyperLink>. It eventually ends up as an <a> element in the page. The NavigateUrl property of this control maps directly to the href attribute of the <a> element. For example, a server-side HyperLink like this:

<asp:HyperLink runat="server" id="lnkLogin" NavigateUrl="Login.aspx">
       You can log in here</asp:HyperLink>

produces the following HTML in the browser:

<a id="ctl00_cpMainContent_lnkLogin" href="Login.aspx">You can log in here</a>

Other than the long ID that is assigned by the ASP.NET runtime, this code is identical to the earlier example. In both cases, the href attribute points to the page Login.aspx using a relative URL. The next topic describes the differences between relative and absolute URLs.

7.1.1. Understanding ...