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Linking Up
Linking is a means of connecting one Internet resource with another. One of the most important elements of Web success, a link allows users to easily navigate to all the information they need on a chosen subject. What it does for the site's owners, however, is drive traffic and, for profit-making ventures, drive revenue. A link is especially helpful for new and emerging businesses whose traffic is minimal. They can, by linking to more heavily trafficked URL's draw more viewers to their own online message.
A crucial part of understanding linking is understanding HTML.
HTML (which stands for hyper text markup language, was created to facilitate global distribution of information. Programmers and others realized that in order to communicate electronically computer would need a language that was universally understood. HTML became that language.
What HTML does for those using it, is to allow them to publish on the World Wide Web, whether it be documents that have headings and text, possibly with graphs and tables, lists, photographs, clip art and so forth. It also allows publishers to access other information on the Internet via linking, (called hypertext linking because of its use of HTML), to create forms that offer transaction capability via remote resources. The latter would allow for research, hotel or airline reservations, and ecommerce functions such as retail purchases online. HTML also lets publishers incorporate other types of delivery methods into their documents, such as video and audio clips and spread sheets.
Linking - i.e., hypertext linking - has a beginning and an end - or, more aptly, two ends, which we call anchors. Linking has a direction as well. A link begins at one anchor, which is called the sources, and takes the user to the second anchor, which is called the destination. A destination could be an HTML page, or it might instead be a photo, a video, an audio clip, a document or a program.
What linking does is retrieve the destination anchor by either a click on the link or the equivalent keyboard command. This allows the user to view (visit) the destination resource. This destination anchor has to have an anchor name and any URI must include that name as the fragment identifier to effectively "talk to" the destination anchor. (Some URLs refer you to a location that is within a larger resource. When this is the case you'll see a # sign towards the end of the destination address, followed then by the fragment identifier. In the following example, the fragment identifier (that follows the # sign) is section_4.
http://destinationsite.com/html/top.html#section_4
in HTML documents the destination anchor may be indicated by an A element that indicates it by name attribute or by any other type of element indicating it with the id attribute. The id attribute plays many HTML roles, as a selector of style sheet, a destination anchor for linking, a way to reference a specific part of a script, as the name of a specified object, and for processing functions. An example of the latter might be to identify a field as you extract data from an HTML page into your chosen destination database, or for help with translation of an HTML document into another format.
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