Linking Documents with <link>
The <link>
tag is used to define a
relationship between the current document and another external
document. It is always placed in the header
(<head>
) of the document. There can be
multiple <link>
tags in a document. The most
important attributes are href
, which points to the
linked file, and rel
, which describes the
relationship from the source document to the target document. The
rev
attribute describes the reverse relationship
(from the target back to the source).
A variety of attributes make the <link>
tag
very versatile, but it is not currently used to its full potential.
The most popular application of the <link>
tag is for referring to an external style sheet. In this example, the
type
attribute identifies the MIME content type of
the linked document as a cascading style sheet:
<HEAD> <LINK HREF="wholesite.css" REL="stylesheet" TYPE="text/css"> </HEAD>
Another use as recommended in the HTML 4.01 specification is to refer to an alternate version of the document in another language. The following example creates a link to a French version of the document:
<HEAD> <LINK REL="alternate" HREF="translations/french.html" TYPE="text/html" HREFLANG="fr"> </HEAD>
By using the next
and prev
values for the rel
attribute, you can establish
the document’s position in a sequence of documents, as shown in
the following example. This information could be used by browsers and
other tools to build navigation menus, tables of contents, or other
link collections.
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