In HTML you create a hyperlink with the a tag. Let's make a working copy of links.html,
and I'll call the copy links-working.html and open it in my text editor. Very simple,
small, HTML page. It's got a paragraph and it's got a link. Go ahead and open this in
the browser. You notice that the file that's opened here is on the desktop. The URL is
a file URL like that. So what that means is that this URL is not on a server. This file
is not on a server. It's on my file system, so that's why we have a file URL. And there
is a link here, and you'll notice the helper text at the bottom of the screen, so down
here we get this little hyper text when I hover my mouse over it. It has an HTTP URL,
so it says http://ldc.bw.org, and if we look here in the HTML file, you see here's a link
to--we have <a href=, and there is that URL that was showing up at the bottom of the screen.
You see it down there at the bottom of the screen? That's exactly the same. So if I click
on this, it loads up that page on my web site, and that URL is ldc.bw.org. Now, this is Firefox,
and it obscures parts of the URL. If I put my cursor up here-- and that still doesn't
do it. In some browsers, if you put your cursor up there, it will show you the whole URL with
the HTTP and everything. Here it's just showing you the part of it that goes after the HTTP.
So that's not helping us much, but that's what it looks like. So the a link, a stands
for anchor, and that's a historical reference really. A tags aren't so much anchors any
more as they are just links. Used to have a dual purpose, and one of those purposes
has been completely deprecated out of HTML. But it looks like this. It has the name of
the tag, which is a; the href attribute, which specifies the URL where the link goes; and
so it's as simple as that. And if we come back to the page here and we reload, we can
click on that link and it takes us where we want to go. There is one attribute I'd like
to show you here. It's the target attribute. You can specify the name of a named window
that's been opened and created with JavaScript, or you can say _blank. And if I save this
now, it will open it in a blank page, and in Firefox that usually means a tab. Let me
reload here and go ahead and click on that, and so it's opened this page in a new tab
and it's left that alone in the old tab. In some browsers it will actually open it in
new window. Now the a tag is actually an inline tag, but it's unique in that it will allow
block-level content. And so if I take out this whole paragraph here and instead, in
between this a tag I can put block-level content. I can do something like section, and I can
give it a little bit of style, and inside of that, I can have an h1 tag and I can have
paragraph tags, and all of this can be inside of an a element. You know, when I save this
and reload it in the browser, all of that is now this link and I can click anywhere
in there and it will bring me to the target page. The a element by itself is very powerful,
and it may look and work in many different ways, especially when combined with CSS. We'll