We explain what hyperlinks are and what these elements are for on the web. Types of hyperlinks and examples of use.
What is a hyperlink?
Is called hyperlink either hyperlink to a type of element present in electronic documents (Web pages, emails, digital text documents, etc.) that refers to another different document, to a specific part of the same document or to another resource of any nature, such as online searches , purchasing mechanisms, subscriptions, etc.
Hyperlinks consist, therefore, of the possibility of “jumping” from one text to another from one information to another, following the thread of association of the user's interests, rather than a linear and successive logic as occurs in traditional culture.
These types of associations are fundamental in the operation of the World Wide Web, since a hyperlink, together with an access protocol to an established data network, allows you to “visit” the different resources available online either to view them or download them to the computer.
Every hyperlink has two ends: a source anchor and a destination link. The first are usually highlighted in browsers or Internet browsers (in color and underlined, So). By selecting the point of origin you have access to a single destination, which can be of different multimedia nature. When hyperlinks stop operating, because they fail to track the promised content, they are called “broken.”
What are hyperlinks for?
Hyperlinks enable a novel form of scrolling, often referred to as linkand which consists of the association between one text and another that do not necessarily share context or tasks but which are chained together by some term, meaning or reference.
It is similar to searching for a word in the dictionary: the description of the meaning may contain other unknown words that we would in turn look up in the dictionary and so on, moving away from the original.
Types of hyperlink
There are various types of hyperlinks, based on the content or action they perform and their environment:
- Text hyperlink Those that start and/or lead to a digital text, or to a specific part of one, such as a chapter or a footnote. This allows the creation of a network of meaning between two or more reading texts.
- Image hyperlink Similar to the previous case, but leads to a given image hosted online. This is also the case of images that contain a hyperlink, and that when selected lead to new resources, as in online advertising.
- Hyperlink to email Activates preset mechanisms to send an email message to a preset email address.
- Hyperlink to specific features Activates preset mechanisms to perform specific functions on the computer, such as printing, saving, increasing font size, etc.
Hyperlinks can also be classified according to the location of the resource they invoke, as follows:
- Local or internal hyperlink It refers to content hosted in a local directory, whether it is the same computer, the same web page, etc.
- External hyperlink It refers, however, to content external to the system, such as a different web page.
Hyperlink Examples
Examples of hyperlinks abound on the Internet. In online encyclopedias like Wikipedia, for example, words or phrases that have additional content in a parallel entry are highlighted in color and underlining so that When we click on them, the browser takes us to the content corresponding.
The same happens when we visit a commercial Web page and want to contact the administrator, by clicking on the hyperlink that takes us to their email box, or if we simply want to advance to the section of the Web page where we can make the payment.
Hyperlink in html
The html is a typical programming language for web pages and the digital interaction of the Internet. Among its numerous functions is that of programming hyperlinks, for which two operations are required: 1) setting the anchors or bookmarks, and 2) entering the link addresses.
The descriptors for this resource, when it comes to local hyperlinks, are “name” (in new versions of html it has already been eliminated) or “id”, and are introduced as follows in the text corresponding to the destination:
The “href” command can then be used within the source text to allow jumps to named sections (with “name” or “id”). In the case of external hyperlinks, the “href” command must be used directly with the requested URL address.
For example, for a local link:
For an external link:
