Building Links in Documents

Class notes for March 21, 1996
Professor John M. McCann

A tutorial at New Mexico State University provides a good introduction to Hypertext Tags.

This note illustrates a few of the concepts and the way that I work with Netscape and an editor such as HTML Assistant.

Let's assume you want to develop a page that has several hypertext links:

To another site

We want to build a link to Duke's homepage. I use the following steps:
  1. I bring up Duke's page in Netscape.
  2. I click in the Location area to highlight the URL and use the Edit Copy command (or Ctrl-C) to place the URL on the clipboard.
  3. I go back to HTML Assistant, enter the word or phrase that I want linked (in this case, I enter Duke), and then select the word or phrase.
  4. With the word or phrase selected, I click on the Link button. whick opens the "Enter a URL Link" dialogue box.
  5. I clear the bottom window (the one denoted URL Text) and use the Edit Paste command to paste the Duke URL. The dialogue box should then look something like:

  6. I click OK and the word Duke is now linked to the Duke page, as illustrated below.
This is the link to Duke.

From a picture to another site

This time, I want to link from a picture to the Duke home page.
  1. I find an image that I want to use in my document and put the image in the same directory that contains the HTML document. In this example, I am using an image of Duke Chapel that I have titled chapel.gif.
  2. I place the cursor where I want the image to be placed in the document
  3. I hit the Image button in HTML Assistant, which opens the "Enter the URL for the Image" dialogue box.
  4. I clear the URL Text window and type in the name of the gif file. The result is a dialogue box that looks like the following:

  5. I clicl OK and the picture of the chapel is now included in the page via an IMG tag:
  6. I select all of the tag, hit the Link button, and type in the Duke URL in the Enter URL window.
  7. When I select OK, the image is now linked to the Duke page.

From a word or phrase to another place in the same document

Linking from one place in a document to another place in the same document requires the use of the Anchor tag.
  1. Find the place you want to be the anchor. In this example, we will use the heading for this section.
  2. Place the cursor at the beginning of the heading. In this example, I place it on the left margin beside the Header 2 tag.
  3. Hit the Anchor button and type a word or phrase into the dialogue box. In this example, I typed anchorlink
  4. When you close the dialogue box, an anchor tag will be placed at the designated place. (View the Document Source for this page to see this anchor).
  5. Find the place in the document that you want to link to this anchor. In this example, I go to the unordered list at the beginning of the document and select the phrase "From a word or phrase to another place in the same document"
  6. Hit the Link button and type # followed by the name of the anchor in the URL Text window. I typed #anchorlink
  7. Hit OK and the link is made.
The # symbol before the anchor name denotes an internal link.

A Mailto Link

We can use HTML Assistant to create a mailto link within our document.
  1. Type in the word or phrase that you want to be linked. In this example, I typed in "Send mail to John McCann"
  2. Select the phrase, or portion, that you want linked. In this example, I selected "John McCann"
  3. Hit the Link button,select mailto: in the URL prefixes window, and type in the email address after mailto: in the URL Text window. The box should then look like the following:,br>

  4. Click OK and you get a mailto link as shown below.
Send mail to John McCann