Hello and welcome to web technology core concepts at Learning Journal. In these videos, we are trying to build a sound foundation for learning and understanding things related to web technologies. Hyperlinks are one of the most important constituents of a website. We already talked about hyperlink or simply a link in an earlier video. However, in this video, we will try to explore and understand it in a little more detail.
Origination of Hyperlink
The term hyperlink is not new. This term was first used by Ted Nelson as a mechanism to link related information. Later, Sir Tim Berners-Lee used it in his development of HTTP protocol. Since then, hyperlinks are being used to link related content over World Wide Web.
Importance of Hyperlinks
At the most basic level, a hyperlink is a pointer to a resource. These links may point to a
variety of things.
Some commonly used resources are listed here.
- HTML documents
- Specific parts of an HTML document
- Images
- Videos
- File downloads
This list is not exhaustive. In fact, you can create a link to anything that can live on the
internet.
I hope you already understand that anything or everything that lives on the web has a
URL. The
URL is used to identify and locate the resource. So, to create a hyperlink that points
to
a resource, the first thing that you should know is the resource
URL. Once you have the
URL, rest is simple.
We will learn more about HTML in a separate video series. However, HTML offers a simple
mechanism
to create a hyperlink.
Here is an example HTML code.
If you save this code in a test.html file and open the file in a browser, you will see something like this.
In this example, the text
"Google" is a hyperlink. However, behind that text, we have an HTML tag. This tag is
known
as
anchor tag that is responsible for creating hyperlinks. If you look at the code
carefully,
we have a
href attribute. The attribute
href stands for hypertext reference. The value of the
href attribute is a URL. The URL is the resource that we want to point the link.
Right?
That’s what I said earlier. To create a hyperlink that points to a resource, you need to know
its
URL. There are a variety of things you can do with the anchor tag and customize your
hyperlinks
and their behaviour. We will talk about those things in our HTML tutorials. However, the
objective
of this video was to give you a realistic sense of the hyperlink. I guess I fulfilled the
purpose.
That`s it for this session. See you again with a new concept.
Thank you for watching Learning Journal. Keep learning and keep growing.