If you're a dedicated Web wanderer, then you know the coolest thing about Web pages are the links to other pages. A quick click on a particular link and you're off on a journey to a whole new world.
| The Duke of URL |
| Addresses of Web pages and other Net locations that use this format are called uniform resource locators, or URLs, for short. |
To give the people reading your Web pages the same kind of thrill, there are HTML tags that you can use to designate a block of text to be a link. Specifically, you use the <A> and </A> tags (the "A" stands for, strangely, "Anchor") to create a link. The <A> tag is a bit more complicated than your garden-variety tag, so let's take a close look at it. Here's the general format to use:
<A HREF="Address">Link text</A>
Here, the Address part is the Web address of the page to which you want to link. Web addresses are ugly-looking things, but there's just no avoiding them. For example, here's the Web address of my home page:
http://www.hookup.net/~paulmcf/logophilia.html http://www.logophilia.com/Home/homepage.html
The Link text part is the word or phrase that your readers will click on to jump to whatever page you specified in the Address part. Here's an example that includes a link you could use to connect to my home page (how flattering!):
<HTML> <HEAD> <TITLE>Linking to Another Page</TITLE> </HEAD> <BODY> This example includes a link to <A HREF="http://www.logophilia.com/Home/homepage.html"> some geek author's home page</A>. </BODY> </HTML>
The next figure shows how the link looks to a Web surfer. To broaden your link education, leap to Chapter 7, "The Jump to Hyperspace: Adding Links."
| The <A> tag lets you include in your Web page links to other Web goodies. | 
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You can really spruce up a dry Web page by adding pictures. Whether it's a corporate logo, one of the kids' drawings, or a picture of yourself, images are a great way to break up the monotony of plain text.
There are a number of issues involved in using images in your Web page (such as what type of format to use, how do you get images on your computer, and so on), but don't worry about them now. (For the nitty-gritty on images, see Chapter 8, "A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Clicks: Working with Images.") For now, I'll just show you how to use the <IMG> tag that tells a Web browser to display a specific image. Here's the general format:
<IMG SRC="image">
Here, image is the name of the graphics file you want to display. For example, if the file is named myface.gif, then you use the following tag to display it:
<IMG SRC="myface.gif">
Before you foist your completed page on your fellow Web denizens, you should use a Web browser to make sure everything looks okay. "Wait a minute! How can I use a Web browser to check out a page if the page isn't on the Web yet!" No problem. Lots of browsers have a feature that lets you load a page right from your computer's hard disk. In Netscape, for example, you pull down the File menu, select the Open File command, and then choose the file from the Open dialog box that appears. In Microsoft's Internet Explorer, you select the File menu's Open command, select the Open File button in the Open Internet Address dialog box that appears, and then pick out the file you need. I'll talk more about this, as well as give the appropriate instructions for some other browsers, in Chapter 9, "Publishing Your Page on the Web."
When you're satisfied that your page is suitable for human consumption, you're ready to publish it on the Web for all to see. To get your page online, you need to set up a location on a Web server (A server is a computer that makes documents available to other people on the Internet.) You usually have two choices (see Chapter 9 for details):
After you establish a Web account, you just send your page to the appropriate location (the provider will tell you where). You'll normally do this using an Internet service called FTP (File Transfer Protocol). I'll describe how this works in Chapter 9.
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