Definition of Hyperlink Gartner Information Technology Glossary
Being human-readable, URLs already made things easier, but it’s hard to type a long URL whenever you want to access a document. Links can correlate any text string with a URL, such that the user can instantly reach the target document by activating the link. A web browser usually displays a hyperlink in some distinguishing way, e.g. in a different color, font or style, or with certain symbols following to visualize link target or document types.
An area on a Web page that, when clicked on with a mouse, will transport the user to another Web page. Also called “links” or “hot links,” hyperlinks are analogous to hypertext. Hyperlinks are commonly used on the Web to provide navigation, reference and depth where published text cannot. Creation of new windows is probably the most common use of the “target” attribute. To prevent accidental reuse of a window, the special window names “_blank” and “_new” are usually available, and always cause a new window to be created. It is especially common to see this type of link when one large website links to an external page.
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Hyperlinks are often used to implement reference mechanisms such as tables of contents, footnotes, bibliographies, indexes, letters, and glossaries. Below is an example of how to create a hyperlink on an HTML (hypertext markup language) page. In our visual example, you can see that a hyperlink uses the a tag with the href attribute that points to the file or web page. In the example, the hyperlink would be titled “Computer Hope” and point to the hope.html file.
When you’re starting out, you don’t have to worry about external and incoming links as much, but they are very important if you want search engines to find your site (see below for more details). Without external links, there is no Web, since the Web is a network of webpages. Use external links to provide information besides the content available through your webpage.
How do you create a hyperlink?
A way of connecting different Web pages together on the Internet. A hyperlink is a word or graphic display on one Web page that allows a computer to shift to another related Web page. In HTML, you can create a hyperlink on an image in two ways. To link the complete image, you can place the img tag in the anchor tag. To create a hyperlink in only part of the image, use an image map.
The fragment is generally a portion of text or a heading, though not necessarily. For instance, it may also be a hot area in an image (image map in HTML), a designated, often irregular part of an image. An inline link may display a modified version of the content; for instance, instead of an image, a thumbnail, low resolution preview, cropped section, or magnified section may be shown. The full content is then usually available on demand, as is the case with print publishing software – e.g., with an external link. This allows for smaller file sizes and quicker response to changes when the full linked content is not needed, as is the case when rearranging a page layout.
However, you make and use anchors the same way as other links. When you’re building a website, focus on internal links, since those make your site usable. Find a good balance between having too many links and too few.
We also learned how to create different types of links in HTML. This type of hyperlink in the example above links to other sites. It’s an external link, used to connect two pages from two completely different websites.
For example, “Computer Hope home page” is a hyperlink to the Computer Hope home page. Have you ever noticed that certain words on the Web look a little bit different? Whenever you see a word or phrase that’s underlined in blue, it’s probably a hyperlink, or link for short. You might already know how links work, even if you’ve never thought about them much before. The document containing a hyperlink is known as its source document. For example, in content from Wikipedia or Google Search, many words and terms in the text are hyperlinked to definitions of those terms.
The behavior and style of links can be specified using the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) language. Wikilinks are visibly distinct from other text, and if an internal wikilink leads to a page that does not yet exist, it usually has a different specific visual appearance. For usability, many websites (including Computer Hope) change the color of visited (opened) hyperlinks to let the reader know what page they have visited. For example, unless you have already viewed our motherboard page, the link should be blue.
A browser changes the pointer from an arrow to a finger to indicate it can be opened. Also, at the bottom of the browser window, the URL of the link should appear to help you identify where the link points. First, highlight the text or picture that you want to hyperlink to something else. You can either right-click that text, click a link icon in your editor, or press Ctrl+K. Then paste or type the link in the address box and confirm your entry by pressing Enter.
Hyperlinks between different parts of a document or between different documents create a branching or network structure that can accommodate direct, unmediated jumps to pieces of related information. Hyperlinks are, in a sense, cross-references that afford instant access to their target pieces of information. Hyperlinks have been used most successfully by Web sites on the Internet. A software system that is used for viewing and creating hypertext is a hypertext system, and to create a hyperlink is to hyperlink (or simply to link). A user following hyperlinks is said to navigate or browse the hypertext.
- In the example below, we’re clicking a link to learn more about the Cape Hatteras National Seashore.
- This article goes over the definition of a hyperlink and how to create a variety of different links in HTML.
- When you click, tap, or select a hyperlink, the browser leaves the current page you are viewing and opens the link for the new page.
- It can also point to a specific section or element within the same webpage or document.
- Before the Web, it was quite hard to access documents and move from one to another.
Improving a website’s use of links is one helpful SEO technique. In this article, we’ll go over what hyperlinks are and why they matter. Tim Berners-Lee saw the possibility of using hyperlinks to link any information to any other information over the Internet. Hyperlinks were therefore integral to the creation of the World Wide Web.
A hyperlink is an icon, graphic, or often underlined phrase in a document that links to another resource or web page. For example, many websites actually use images as links, so you can just click the image to navigate to another page. In the example below, we’re clicking the picture of a coffee mug to open https://www.globalcloudteam.com/ a page with more information about it. The linked text (the reference to data) is called anchor text. Every time search engines crawl a webpage, they index the website by following the links available on the webpage. Before the Web, it was quite hard to access documents and move from one to another.
A link may also open a new tab and keep the current window open as a background tab. A hyperlink can be a piece of text, an image, an icon, or a graphic that, when you click on it, points to and navigates you to a different webpage or document. It can also point to a specific section or element within the same webpage or document. When you follow a link pointing to an anchor, your browser jumps to another part of the current document instead of loading a new document.
Being human-readable, URLs already made things easier, but it’s hard to type a long URL whenever you want to access a document. Links can correlate any text string with a URL, such that the user can instantly reach the target document by activating the link. A web browser usually displays a hyperlink in some distinguishing…