Your book does a very good job of instructing you on how to use relative links to link to the other pages in your web site and complete URLs to link to pages in the outside world. However, in my opinion the text gets "links to destination anchors" wrong. (This is the one place where I think the text gets something wrong.) I'll describe a better (and easier) way to do it here. However, I won't penalize you if you follow the procedure outlined in the text.

In addition, your book doesn't cover email links.

Jump Links

Jump links take you from one place to another on the same web page. You can also use jump links to take you to a specific spot in a separate web page, as demonstrated in your book on pp. 151 - 155.

You have to create two bits of code for a jump link to work - a destination spot and a link that links to that destination spot. Your book tells you to create a "destination anchor", an "a" element that contains an "id" attribute to define your destination. This will work, and, if it makes sense to you, do it that way.

However, you can do away with the a element and simply put the "id" attribute into just about any kind of element. Suppose we want to go from the bottom of the page to the top. Within the very first element after the body element (say it's an h1 element), you would simply include an attribute of id="top" that would look like this:

<h1 id="top">My Web Page</h1>

Now that we have a place to go, let's build the link to get there. You write:

<a href="#top">To the Top</a>

Notice that the value of the href is the same as the value of your id, but with a # in front of it. This code will create a link that says "To the Top" that, when clicked, will jump you up to the top of the page.

Important note about choosing your id values: You can use any word you want as the value of the id, but I strongly recommend that you use only lowercase letters. Id values are VERY case-sensitive (meaning that "hello" and "Hello" are two different id values). To make matters worse, if you mess up the capitalization, some browsers (Internet Explorer) will still do the jump, but it won't work in other browsers. (And you will lose points.) Technically, id values can also include digits, hyphens, underscores, colons, and periods (as long as they don't occur as the first character in the id value). But if you don't want to get bogged down with this detail, just use all lowercase letters and you'll be fine.

One frequent use of this kind of link is in a situation where the web page has a lot of information on it and is broken into easily identifiable sections. You will find a list of links at the top of the page that take you to the section you are interested in viewing. This saves the viewer the agony of having to scroll down and down and down... The class FAQ page is an example of this approach.

Students often think that their jump links aren't working because their page is not long enough for the jump link to have anywhere to jump. To avoid this situation, I suggest that you place about 20 or 30 "<br />" tags at the bottom of your webpage (just above the </body> tag). You can see this demonstrated on the training page in the Misty example.

Email Links

An email link is very easy to construct. You say:

<a href="mailto:dharden@santarosa.edu">dharden@santarosa.edu</a>

Needless to say, you would use your own email address, not mine. What this does is force the text "dharden@santarosa.edu" to appear as a blue underlined link that tries to open an email program so that you can send a message to me.

You have all seen email links that use clickable text such as "Email Me" or "Webmaster" instead of the email address I have demonstrated above. This approach works fine as long as you are at home and have your computer set up to launch your email program when you click on an email link. However, suppose you are at someone else's computer, or suppose you use Hotmail or Yahoo! as your email program. In either of these cases, clicking on that link won't allow you to complete the task. Some weird program will open and you won't know what to do from there.

As a good web designer, then, you make your clickable text the actual email address so that a viewer can swipe over the text, copy it, and then paste it into their email program address box.