Creating Research-Based Web Sites with Netscape Composer

Hyperlinks

Hyperlinks in web documents are a quick and easy way to take the person viewing the web page to another page by simply clicking on the hyperlink text or image.  You can use hyperlinks (links) to connect to information on your web site, or on other web sites on the internet.  Hyperlinks are the foundation of the World Wide Web.  They provide the basic ability to connect web pages together to create “webs” of information. 

The creation of hyperlinks is done with special HTML Tags.  Here is what the HTML code for a hyperlink looks like:

 

The first part of the tag defines what site to take the user to once it is clicked on (in this example, they will go to http://www.umw.edu).  The second part of the tag defines what text is written out on the page that will be clickable (in this case, “The University of Mary Washington” will be the link that appears on the page).

 

Netscape Composer, the web authoring software we will be using for this course will handle the creation of these tags for us, but since this is one of the most basic tags, it is a good one to know when you need to troubleshoot your HTML pages.

 

There are two different kinds of hyperlinks to be aware of as you work on your web projects - they are called Absolute links, and Relative links. 

 

Absolute links point to a specific file in a specific location every time, all the time. The best time to use absolute links is when you are linking to resources outside of your web site. While this might seem like a useful thing (and it is when used correctly) using absolute links can also create links that do not work once the pages are published to the web server.  This is because if you create absolute links that point to files located on your hard drive, the web page will search for the files on your hard drive.  And since your hard drive is not connected to the internet, none of the links work.

 

We will discuss Absolute vs. Relative links in more detail in a later module, but it is one of the most common mistakes students make when creating their web projects. 

 

Additional Resources

Here is a good explanation of the Absolute vs. Relative link problem in more detail from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington – it is highly recommended:  http://www.uncw.edu/itsd/client/tutorials/rvaurl/