Creating Web Sites: The Missing Manual

Chapter 8. Linking Pages

So far in this book, you’ve concentrated on one Web page at time. While creating a single page is the crucial first step in building a Web site, sooner or later you’ll want to wire several pages together so a Web trekker can easily jump from one to the next. After all, surfing is what the Web’s all about.

It’s astoundingly easy to create links—officially called hyperlinks—between pages. In fact, all you need to do is learn a single new tag: the anchor tag. Once you’ve mastered this bit of HTML lingo, you’re ready to start organizing your Web site into separate folders and transforming your humble collection of Web pages into a full-fledged Web site.

Understanding the Anchor

In HTML, you use the anchor tag to create a link that, when clicked, transports the Web site reader to another page.

The anchor tag is a straightforward container tag. It looks like this:

	<a>…</a>

Inside the anchor tag, you put the clickable content:

	<a>Click Me</a>

The problem with the above link is that it doesn’t point anywhere. To turn this into a fully functioning link, you need to supply the URL of the destination page using the href attribute (which stands for hypertext reference). For example, if you want a click to take the reader to a page named LinkedPage.htm, you’d create this link:

	<a href="LinkedPage.htm">Click Me</a>

In order for this line to actually work, the LinkedPage.htm file must reside in the same folder as the Web page that contains the link. You’ll learn how to become ...