Linking is what makes the web interesting and versatile. There are three kinds of links: off page links, on page links, and e-mail. Links are called anchors in HTML. The page is anchored to other sites allowing travel between pages. To set up an anchor you first need to know the URL of where you are going. For example, if you are going to link to the University of Wisconsin - Platteville home page the URL is "http://www.uwplatt.edu". So to create an anchor you use the URL in the anchor tag. Let's create a link to the UWP homepage!

<a href='http://www.uwplatt.edu'>UWP home page</a>

A link is show as an underlined text by default. The same idea works for linking to another page that may be on your web site. If you create a HTML document called "family.html" and it is saved in your "www" folder, to link to it you use the following format.

Visit my <a href="family.html">Family!</a>

You do not have to use the "http://www.uwplatt.edu/~USERNAME" portion of the link because the browser is already in the folder that you are linking to. So the browsers only need to know when you leave your site or change folders in your site. If you have the "family.html" in a subfolder or your "www" folder called "personal", then you would have to change the anchor and let the browser know that you have changed folders.

Visit my <a href="personal/family.html">Family!</a>

If you have the "family.html" in a folder just outside the "www" folder in another folder called "personal" then the anchor would be.

Visit my <a href="../personal/family.html">Family!</a>

E-mail links are similar to anchors. They use the following format:

<a href="mailto:web@uwplatt.edu">E-mail</a>the Webmaster at UWP.

The last anchors are the on page links. If you have an extremely long text document and you want to be able to send the visitor to the top of the page from the very bottom, you can use the on page anchor. It works the same as a normal anchor that is off page, but it references a bookmark that you place in your document. The bookmark is called with the name of the bookmark and the number sign.

<body>
<a name="top">This</a> will be the top of the page.<br />
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Go back to the <a href="#top">top</a>of the page.
</body>

In XHTML 1.0 Strict, XHTML 1.1, and HTML 4.01 Strict the name property does not exist. Rather, you must set a id on the target <a> tag, and address that. For instance

<body>
<a id="top">This</a> will be the top of the page.<br />
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Go back to the <a href="#top">top</a>of the page.
</body>

Referencing an <a> tag by its id does not work in Netscape 4.x, and may not work in other similar older browsers. If you are expecting to support these old browsers, use XHTML Transitional instead of Strict or XHTML 1.1

Next we will go onto inserting pictures!