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Links

Updated onDec 23, 2021byAlan Morel

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Links

Links, hyperlinks, or anchor elements, on the web are the primary form of navigation. Without them, the web as we know it would be a very different place. Links are used to navigate to other pages on the web, files, email addresses, or to navigate to other parts of the same page. Let's learn what the difference between absolute and relative links is, and what ID links are.

Absolute Links

Absolute links are links that are given an exact destination to a web page. Creating an absolute link can be done with an anchor tag, or a tag. These tags require a destination which is where you want the user to go to upon clicking it.

Giving your anchor tag a destination is done by giving a value to the href attribute. Here is how to create a hyperlink:

HTML
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
    <head>
        <title>Absolute Links</title>
    </head>
    <body>
        <h1>Search the web!</h1>
        <p>
            <a href="https://www.google.com">Google</a>
        </p>
    </body>
</html>

This is how a link looks like.

In our case, since we provided a absolute link to Google's homepage, that is where clicking the link will take us.

Relative Links

What if you just want to link to a file in the same page/directory/folder? This is where relative links come into play. Relative links are links that are given a destination that is relative to the current page.

For example, if you have two files in the same directory/folder, index.html and food.html, you can link from index.html to food.html by doing something like this:

HTML
<a href="food.html">This is a link to food.html!</a>

If you want your relative link to be relative to the root instead of the current, folder/directory, start the link off with a /.

Also important to know, if you want to make your links open a new tab, give it a target attribute with the value of _blank, like so:

HTML
<a href="food.html" target="_blank">This link will open in a new tab.</a>

ID Links

Another popular use of the anchor tag is giving the href attribute a value of an id of another element on the page. This will create a link to the anchor element with the same id.

Clicking on this link will make your browser scroll to that element on the page. This is useful for skipping large sections of your page. For example, if you have a large section of text on your page, you can link to that section by giving it an id, then, when you click on the link, your browser will scroll to that section of the page.

Here's an example:

HTML
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
    <head>
        <title>ID Link</title>
    </head>
    <body>
        <p>
            <a href="#cereal">Click here to scroll to a good cereal.</a>
        </p>
        <p id="cereal">Corn Flakes</p>
    </body>
</html>