Link and Anchor Elements

Anchor Element

The anchor element, which appears only within the body of an HTML document, has a start tag, <a> and must have an end tag, </a>. The text, or image, between the start and end tags is a hypertext link. The start tag must have the attribute href, which defines the link destination, or URL. If the destination page and the subject page are in the same directory and the desitnation page is "anchor2.html" and the linking text is "build a bridge", then the anchor element HTML looks like this,

<p>Learn how to <a href="anchor2.html">build a bridge</a> from one web page to another.</p>

The web browser will display it like this.

Learn how to build a bridge from one web page to another.

To form an anchor using the Geany editor:

  1. Place the cursor before, or after, the text, or image element, that is to be the link
  2. Copy / Paste the anchor element from the XHTML Cliptext page
  3. Drag and drop the text, or image, that will be the link between the anchor start and end tags
  4. Enter the path and file name of the destination document as the value of the href attribute. See the example, above.

Link Element

The link element may be used only within the head of an HTML document. The link element is referred to as an empty element, because an end tag is forbidden. One of the uses of the link element is to link an external style sheet to the HTML document. Here is an example of the link element,

<link href="style.css" rel="stylesheet" />