Creating a Link

Very few people are going to have just one web page with nowhere to go on it. You may want to have several pages or want people to go to other web pages you've found interesting. The command for making this possible is one of the easiest in HTML.

<A HREF= "URL">Name of Link</A>

That's the command. All you have to do is substitute "URL" for the address of your link and then give your link a name. "Name of Link" will appear in blue underlined text and when your readers click on it with their mouse, they will magically be transfered to another page. Let's try our own.

Pull up your Notepad file. (Start, Programs, Accessories, Notepad, File, Open, and be sure to change the file type to "All Files"). Near the bottom, before the closing </BODY> tag, insert this line.

<A HREF= "http://www.cameron.edu/">Cameron University's Home Page</A>

Save your file, and look at it in Netscape. (File, Open Page) Don't forget to press the Back button to get back to this page.

Your document should have had Cameron University's Home Page at the bottom of the page. If you didn't, check your file to make sure you copied the code correctly. You may have left off one of the double slashes after http.

Types of URL's

You don't just have to go to web sites from Netscape. Here's some other types of addresses.

HTTP-web pages

This is the one you will use most often in your own page. Not all web pages will start with www in them. For example, if you wanted to fill out a form to receive all sorts of interesting catalogs, you would go to the URL of http://catalog.savvy.com. You can tell a few things about these addresses though. Educational institutions will always have .edu in their initial address. Commercial businesses have .com and government institutions have .gov in the address. Some addresses will also include the country in which the page is located. If you see an address with .uk at the end, you can expect to wait a bit on the download as the page is located in the United Kingdom.

Your address may be longer than just a few words however. Cameron's web server is divided into several subdirectories. To learn about the faculty in the english department, you would need the address

http://www.cameron.edu/academic/liberal_arts/english/englfac.html.

The englfac.html at the end indicates to the browser to get a particular page. Without the englfac.html, the browser would have searched for the default index.html. (That's why you'll save the page you're creating as index.html when you upload it.) In this case, Netscape would have searched for index.html and pulled up the English Department home page.

GOPHER - gopher services

Gopher services are text based but can still be viewed from graphic browsers. Most of the gopher sites have moved to web pages, but every once in a while, you'll find a gopher site. If you wanted to include a link on your page to the University of Minnesota's gopher you would put the following in your Notepad file.

<A HREF= "gopher://gopher.tc.umn.edu:70/1">University of Minnesota's Gopher System</A>

FTP - file transfer protocol

FTP sites are wonderful resources for freeware and shareware. Before you had to go through a long drawn out process typing in 'open ftp, cd, put, get, mput, mget, quit, etc.' Now you can go to a site directly through Netscape which automatically logs into the site, click on the file you want to download, and tell Netscape where to store the file. If you wanted to include an ftp site in your page, you would use the following code as an example:

<A HREF= "ftp://wuarchive.wustl.edu">Washington University's FTP Site</A>

Links within a Document

You can divide your document into different parts and include a menu at the top for ease of movement within your document. For example, in my entering text document, you could jump directly to plain text, bolding, centering, tables, and lists. Then from each of these, you could go back to the menu after you were done with that section. For the most part, all of these sections were part of one document. I just created links to each section. Here's how.

Give your sections names. Decide which parts you want links to and give them all a name. If you're going to include a menu, be sure to give it a name too. You don't have to give long, elaborate names. Short ones are easier to manipulate. For example, the names for my sections were "top" for the menu, "plaintext," "bold," and "center" (tables and lists were separate html files).
Insert the names into your file. Go to where you want the user to go and insert the following code around some word. <A NAME= "name_of_link">some word</A>. For example, to indicate that my section on centering was named "center", I put the code around my header. It ends up looking like this: <A NAME= "center"><H3>Centering Text</H3></A>. Now when a person clicks on the link to "center," it will jump to "Centering Text."
Create links. Now you will be back to the standard code, <A HREF= "URL"></A> except you will replace "URL" with #name_of_link. In other words, just insert the pound sign before whatever you called your link. A reference to my Centering Text header would be <A HREF= "#center">Learn about Centering Text</A>. A user interested in learning about centering text, would click on that and the browser would jump to my section called Centering Text.
You can also create links to sections from other documents. For example, here's a link to Centering Text from within this document. (Remember to click back to get back to this point.) You do this by using the regular URL reference and then adding #name_of_link at the end. The reference to Centering Text would be <A HREF= "http://www.cameron.edu/~julie/tutorial/plaintext.html#center>link to Centering Text</A>

Page maintained by Julie A. Duncan, ITS
Cameron University, Lawton Oklahoma