About hyperlinks
Essentially, a hyperlink is a tagA tag is a unit of HTML markup. It is an instruction to the Web browser to treat the tagged content in a certain way, such as displaying it with center alignment or making it a clickable link. on a word, phrase, image, or other page element, that tells the Web browser, “When the user clicks this, open X.” X could be just about anything, including:
- another location on the same page
- another page on the same Web site
- a page on another Web site
- an image or multimedia file
- a downloadable program file
- … and so forth.
The tag for a hyperlink only needs to give the browser one piece of information: the URLUniform Resource Locator: the “address” of a resource on the Internet. URLs are a standard way of identifying Internet resources, such as Web documents and files, so that users and computers can find them easily. of the destination resource. Optionally, it can provide other information, such as the name of a frame or window to open the destination in, or a brief text message to display when the user holds the pointer over the link.