and I'll call the copy links-working.html and open it in my text editor. Very simple,

small, HTML page. It's got a paragraph and it's got a link. Go ahead and open this in

the browser. You notice that the file that's opened here is on the desktop. The URL is

a file URL like that. So what that means is that this URL is not on a server. This file

is not on a server. It's on my file system, so that's why we have a file URL. And there

is a link here, and you'll notice the helper text at the bottom of the screen, so down

here we get this little hyper text when I hover my mouse over it. It has an HTTP URL,

so it says http://ldc.bw.org, and if we look here in the HTML file, you see here's a link

to--we have <a href=, and there is that URL that was showing up at the bottom of the screen.

You see it down there at the bottom of the screen? That's exactly the same. So if I click

on this, it loads up that page on my web site, and that URL is ldc.bw.org. Now, this is Firefox,

and it obscures parts of the URL. If I put my cursor up here-- and that still doesn't

do it. In some browsers, if you put your cursor up there, it will show you the whole URL with

the HTTP and everything. Here it's just showing you the part of it that goes after the HTTP.

So that's not helping us much, but that's what it looks like. So the a link, a stands

for anchor, and that's a historical reference really. A tags aren't so much anchors any

more as they are just links. Used to have a dual purpose, and one of those purposes

has been completely deprecated out of HTML. But it looks like this. It has the name of

the tag, which is a; the href attribute, which specifies the URL where the link goes; and

so it's as simple as that. And if we come back to the page here and we reload, we can

click on that link and it takes us where we want to go. There is one attribute I'd like

to show you here. It's the target attribute. You can specify the name of a named window

that's been opened and created with JavaScript, or you can say _blank. And if I save this

now, it will open it in a blank page, and in Firefox that usually means a tab. Let me

reload here and go ahead and click on that, and so it's opened this page in a new tab

and it's left that alone in the old tab. In some browsers it will actually open it in

new window. Now the a tag is actually an inline tag, but it's unique in that it will allow

block-level content. And so if I take out this whole paragraph here and instead, in

between this a tag I can put block-level content. I can do something like section, and I can

give it a little bit of style, and inside of that, I can have an h1 tag and I can have

paragraph tags, and all of this can be inside of an a element. You know, when I save this

and reload it in the browser, all of that is now this link and I can click anywhere

in there and it will bring me to the target page. The a element by itself is very powerful,

and it may look and work in many different ways, especially when combined with CSS. We'll

see more examples of this in the rest of this chapter.