Anchors

• Anchor tags have two opposite purposes

  1. <a href=''> - to link out to another location
  2. <a name=''>- to name a location inside a page that can be linked into

• inner anchors are also defined by id in modern browsers

• when linking to an inner anchor, use the # character to distinguish files from inner anchors)

<a href='#stuff'>here is my stuff</a>
<a href='#things'>here are my things</a>
...
<a name='stuff'>
<h2>My Stuff</h2>
...
<h2 id='things'>My Things</h2>

Anchor links

• Anchor tags create links to a linkable location
  • Within the same page, using an #someId selector
  • Other page within the site, using relative href="/somePage.html"
  • External webpages, using a full URL href="https://www.example.com"

<a href="#about-me">About Me</a>

Lab: Navigation

Anchor tags are probably the most useful element to use when setting up site navigation. Let's make a page with some basic navigation capabilities.

• cd into the example-html directory we set up in the "Hello, HTML!" lab
• You should currently have a document named index.html which has a header, and at least three seperate sections
• in html-example create another HTML document named about.html, and put an h1 element with the text "About Page" (or something similar) in it
• And an anchor tag that links back to the home page (index.html)

• If you are building this off of your 'Hello, HTML!' lab your index.html will already have several sections set up

  • Otherwise, in the index.html file set up several sections with placeholder text
  • You can easily generate placeholder text through lorem ipsum generators
  • The basic idea is to have a page that needs to scroll to have different sections in view. So don't be stingy with the text!

• In your index.html document create a nav section that links to at least two internal sections, the about page, and at least one external site of your choice.