bt3.com: Barrie Turner's Web Site. < go home

bt3.com/html?!
 
Hyperlinks
 
HTML and .html
 
Interested?
          
Central to the concept of HTML, almost all the underlined text you will see on the web is a 'hyperlink' which, when clicked, *does* something.

To digress slightly for a moment:  Putting a means of contacting the author on every page in a web site is a well-established convention. Clicking on the underlined 'baz@bt3.com' email hyperlink at the bottom of this page (and all my pages) sends me an email.

Some site authors use a dedicated contact page. I've done this in the past. When you design your site, it's up to you how it looks ... just remember that people need to have standard visual cues to aid their navigation?

Ok, why not look at the bottom of the page (you may have to 'scroll' the screen downwards) and do it now? This will open your email program with a blank, ready-addressed message just waiting to be composed! You will, of course, have to use a degree of originality in composing the text of your message, but you're good at that, aren't you?  ;o)

   The letters H,T,M and L are the initial letters of the catchy phrase 'Hypertext Mark Up Language'. 'Hypertext' is a phrase coined to describe a body of text and images that contains links between separate, but integral parts of the whole ... a little like a seamlessly interactive index within the main document.

This 'Mark Up Language' bit refers to the bits of formatting of the text you don't see, for instance ... and this is the boring bit ... ok, another boring bit?  :o)

Look at the line of text below for a moment:

hello world !!

So, the text at the bottom of the previous column looks simple enough? Here's the HTML which is translated by your browser and used to display it on your screen: 

<html>
<body>
hello <b>world <i>!!</i></b>
</body>
</html>

Reading in sequence:

<html> makes the following text HTML.
<body> is the start of the displayed text.
'hello ' just displays the text.
<b> makes all the text following bold.
'world ' just displays the text.
<i> makes the text following italic.
'!!' displays two '!'.
</i> turns off italics text. (note the '/')
</b> turns off bold text.
</body> stops displaying text.
</html> tells the browser the end of the file has been reached.

And if you click here, you will see the result, a complete html page!

And no, this isn't interesting, merely illustrative.  :o)

The actual means of displaying hyperlinks on a page varies from site to site, and even page to page though. Some authors don't even underline hyperlinks! Just use a bit of common sense and all will be well.

... possibly. :o}

If you've got this far, you will probably understand now how to navigate around the World Wide Web so I won't keep you any longer. But, before I forget, this page (and the main page) is the last time you will see the phrase 'click here' on my site. I think it gets in the way of the flow of the text. Ok, 'flow' sounds a bit grand for what's here, but I hope you understand?

So-ooo ...

Click here ... for, amongst other things, a description of the layout and design philosophy (a grand title for what you get!) behind this site.

this page is: http://www.bt3.com/why/help.htm
email: baz@bt3.com 1