Tools for Information Literacy

Hyperlinks

Anchor tags allow you to embed instructions that tell the browser to open a hyperlink in another location - either another place in the current page, or another web page, or another place in another web page.

Using anchor tags to hyperlink to other locations

Remember: tag attribute value

The next step is to add some simple hypertext links

This too, is straightforward. You can add an anchor to our course home page by adding the following code to your page (by typing this text into your original file, still on your computer).

<a href="https://ils.unc.edu/courses/2022_fall/inls161_001/index.html">The INLS161-001 Home Page</a>

The above <a> anchor tag can appear anywhere between the <body> and </body> tags.

href (or hypertext reference) is an attribute of the tag.
In this case, the href has a value which indicates what web page is on the other end of the anchor you just created (in other words, what page should get fetched if you click on the anchor, sometimes and more commonly called a hyperlink).

Each tag in HTML has a set of possible attributes, some required, some optional.
The href attribute and its value (the address to which this element is anchored, or hyperlinked) are required.
The best ways to learn about the possibilities is to consult an HTML reference and to look at HTML source code.

Note that like other tags, the <a> anchor tag must be mirrored with a </a> close anchor tag. You are connecting everything between the two tags to that anchor.

hyperlink tags try it out absolute/relative internal

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Using a simple text editor,

add the anchors below to within the body of your local page to create hyperlinks to pages both on and off your website

This web site has a home page and three subordinate pages (or sections, if it is a single page web site). Specifically, the three subordinate pages/sections are 
<ol>
<li><a href="02_aboutme.html">About me</a>. This page (or section, if it is a single page web site) will include a hyperlink to a fuller Curriculum Vitae or a résumé. </li>
<li><a href="02_classes.html">Classes</a>. This page (or section, if it is a single page web site) will include hyperlinks to all the classes I am taking this semester. </li>
<li><a href="02_interests.html">Interests</a>. This page (or section, if it is a single page web site) will include an ordered list of items of my interest. </li>
</ol>

Test it out. Paste your new code into your index file using your text editor and look at it, first in your text editor, and then in your browser of choice. Note that you probably don't already have these other pages. However, if you create them, this page now has a hyperlink to them. You can choose your own page file names; I used these names simply to remind myself that several of the pages are second level pages, while others are third level pages.

Note also that we are using some special characters in this HTML code.
For example, résumé> is rendered in a browser as résumé
(The yellow background is only a span, used here just to make the word résumé stand out.)

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Note the difference between anchors and the references they use:

An ABSOLUTE REFERENCE takes you to one and only one specific location.

<a href="https://ils.unc.edu/courses/2022_fall/inls161_001/index.html"> INLS161-001 Information Tools</a>

In our case, we used an absolute reference to go to our class home page.

A RELATIVE REFERENCE takes you to a location that is hierarchically relative to the specific location of the reference.

<a href="03_classes_task03.html"> Dealing with Markup task</a>

In our case, we used relative references to point to files that we have not yet included in our file structure, but are located in the same directory as the page on which they are written. When we create pages with those file names, the anchor hyperlink will work.

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Internal Links

It's really easy to create internal (relative) hyperlinks in an HTML document. This is important if you have a long document and you want to be able to jump around or if you have a table of contents and you want to allow the reader to jump directly to a chapter or a section. We'll look at creating internal hyperlinks using your page.

For example, each of our pages includes navigation components on the page. The first on on this page appears on lines 100-105 in the code. You can see that the href attribute values are all internal hyperlinks to this page.

To do this, you actually must create two anchors in your HTML that represent the two ends of the hypertext link (or hyperlink). The hyperlink that you click on looks exactly like a normal anchor except that the href attribute is slightly different. Try this

Insert the following at the top of your page: <a href="#bottom">Jump to the Bottom </a>
and the following at the bottom of the page: Bottom of page

<a href="#bottom">Jump to the Bottom</a>
This web site has a home page and three subordinate pages (or sections, if it is a single page web site). Specifically, the three subordinate pages/sections are 
<ol>
<li><a href="02_aboutme.html">About me</a>. This page (or section, if it is a single page web site) will include a hyperlink to a fuller Curriculum Vitae or a résumé. </li>
<li><a href="02_classes.html">Classes</a>. This page (or section, if it is a single page web site) will include hyperlinks to all the classes I am taking this semester. </li>
<li><a href="02_interests.html">Interests</a>. This page (or section, if it is a single page web site) will include an ordered list of items of my interest. </li>
</ol>
Bottom of page

In this example, the top anchor is the hyperlink that you would click on, and the paragraph with a special ID is the place that you would jump to. Note that the top anchor element contains a "#" in the href and the bottom ID element does not.

Note that each time you see on these pages,
you are seeing an anchor (<a href="#top">)
to an id on line 54 (id="top").

Jumping to the middle of another page

No problem, provided that there are anchors of the second form (with an "id" attribute) in that file.
Try this: Insert the following hyperlink in your page to the location of a topic relevant to your task 02.01:

<a href="https://ils.unc.edu/courses/2022_spring/inls161_001/
04a.03.theory.html#document">well-formed web pages</a>

It might look like this in your code

<li><a href="02_interests.html">Interests</a>. This area may have subordinate pages for fuller explorations of personal interests. One interest I have is <a href="https://ils.unc.edu/courses/2022_spring/inls161_001/
04a.03.theory.html#document">well-formed web pages</a></li>

Read the page into your browser and click on the hyperlink.

It's wise to always provide a way for the user to go back up to the top of the page too. You can use a text anchor

such as this one [top]
or you can use a hyperlinked symbol, like the arrow to the right
both go to the id="top" attribute and its associated value on line 64 of this page.

hyperlink tags try it out absolute/relative internal