Linking to other pages

Hypertext links

Hypertext links (the HT in HTML) are part of what makes the WWW so special. You can link to a page in the same directory on the server or one of the other side of the World.

Suppose you have a page2.html that you want to create a link to. To do this you surround the text that you want to make into the link with "tags":

A link to page 2

becomes

which appears on the page as

A link to page 2

For a local link you do not need anything else. Some HTML editors insist on using the absolute URL or including a file attribute for the files on your disk e.g. file:///winsock/fpe/page2.html which won't work once the page is uploaded. You can usually amend these in the packages concerned, but in the ones that try to shield you from the HTML, you may need to edit your documents in a text editor.

The Freeserve webserver is case sensitive. This means that Page2.html is not the same as page2.html and the link

will not work if the file on the server is called Page2.html and similarly the link

A link to Page 2</A>

will not work if the file on the server is called page2.html

Links to a subdirectory

To create a link to a page 3 in a subdirectory called subdirectory:

note the /

Depending on the directory structure on your local hard disk, links to subdirectories may not work when you test them prior to uploading.

To create a link to my Absolute Beginners..page you would use the following:

<A HREF="http://www.zymous.freeserve.co.uk/ABG/abg.html">The Absolute Beginners Guide to creating a Freeserve Homepage</A>

Case is very important!

Linking to anchors

An anchor is defined by the code <A NAME="ananchor"> </A> and linked to by adding #ananchor to the link e.g. there is a anchor called subdir higher in the page

The link to this from the uploading page appears as

<A HREF="linking.html#subdir">Linking to a subdirectory.</A>

You can use the links within a page as well

<A HREF="#top">An Internal link to the top of the page</A> An Internal link of the page

Using images as links

(These are not the same as Image Maps)
You can use an image as link by enclosing the image definition within the link tag:

Linking to non-text files

You can link to a file that is not a page in the same way e.g. to link to programme.zip you would use the following:

<A HREF="programme.zip">A programme</A>

This programme can only be accessed by a web browser and not by FTP.
If your file has an extension that is not recognized by the browser, your browser may try to "display" the file. If you or your visitor are using Netscape press shift as you click on the link it should then save to disk (With MeSsIE it displays in a new browser!)

You can also incorporate a sound file this way (although there are better ways).

<A HREF="sound.wav">A sound</A> Click on the speaker