SW Neighborhoods, Inc. Empowering Citizens since 1978

To add a link to another web page, use the HTML “A” element. This element has an opening tag (<a>), content, and a closing tag(</a>), like this:

   <a href="URI">link text</a>

The content is everything in-between the opening and closing tags, in this case the words “link text.” The content becomes your link. (If your content included an <img> element, a graphic would become be part of your link.)

The href attribute specifies the target, or URI (Uniform Resource Indicator), of your link. Although many browsers are forgiving, the URI should always be enclosed in straight quotes! This is especially important if the URI contains characters like spaces.

Absolute vs Relative references

You can specify two types of URI’s: relative and absolute. The difference between relative and absolute URI’s is that absolute URI’s can point anywhere on the web, whereas relative URI’s can only point to the same server. While you can use an absolute URI to reference a page on the same server, there are several reasons why this is generally bad practice.

On the SWNI server, using an absolute URI to point to a resource on the SWNI server is something which can cost you a lot of work later, if we make certain onfiguration changes to the server (which is likely). So you should be in the habit of using relative links to reference pages (or uploaded files) on the SWNI website. Doing so is simple. All you have to do is omit “http://swni.org” from the absolute URI.

Note: If you are not familiar with the term “URI,” you can think of it as a “URL.” A URL is actually a specific kind of URI (as is a “URN”). URL is generally a deprecated term.