Web Standards Programmer's Reference: HTML, CSS, JavaScript®, Perl, Python®, and PHP

6.3. Using the Anchor Tag

The anchor tag (<a>) is used to provide links within Web documents to other documents or resources on the Internet. The anchor tag has a simple format:

<a href="url_to_resource">textual_description_of_link</a>

The anchor tag can appear by itself or around other HTML elements. For example, a link to product information could appear in a document as follows:

<p>More information on product XYZ can be found <a
href="http://www.example.com/productXYZ/info.html">here</a>.</p>

In this case, the paragraph would appear as shown in Figure 6-2, with the word here being the link to the other document.

According to the XHTML standard, anchor links need to be placed within block elements (headings, paragraphs, and so on).

Figure 6-2. Figure 6-2

As previously mentioned, URLs can refer to other resources besides HTML documents. You can refer to other resources to be delivered via other protocols by specifying the correct protocol and server in the anchor tag. For example, the following tag would refer to a ZIP compressed file delivered via the FTP protocol:

<a href="ftp://ftp.example.com/somefile.zip">ZIP version of the file</a>

You can also use an anchor tag to spawn helper applications on the user's computer. For example, this anchor would open the default e-mail application on the user's computer to send an e-mail message to [e-mail]:

<a href="mailto:[e-mail]">Email ...