18: HTML links - let's build a web!

Some may argue that links are the most important feature of the Web - they make it a Web after all, linking all the pages together. In this article, Christian Heilmann takes you on a detailed tour of using the <a> element to create accessible, meaningful links.

( Read the article )

A bit confused here: do you recommend using the id or the name for anchors? You seem to have corrected your text but which of the two is correct?

One other type of link you can find on websites, is the mailto-link. Many times it is disguised as a "contact" or "info" link. When a visitor clicks on it, the email program jumps in his face. Annoying at least. Especially when the "contact" link is part of the main menu.
It happens, I've seen it!

Good examples of mailto-links are "info@example.com" or "send me an email".

My 2 (Euro)cents.

The print for me doesn't work right. It ignores the equivalent of the first page. I've printed many opera articles, and from the WSC Curriculum articles 18,19, and a handful in the 20s don't print right for me....

In the list at the end of chapter "Link or target?" there is a misstype: "ref" instead of "href".

<whisper>You can make framesets bookmarkable, but as it involves a fragile javascript hack, i fully agree and say:</whisper> "Please no frames".

As the article recommends the "id" attribute:
1. "Link or target? The name and href attributes" should be "Link or target? The id and href attributes"
2. "A fragment identifier or anchor name" should be "A fragment identifier or id name"
3. "(with a name attribute)" should be "(with an id attribute)"
4. "The need for an anchor name to be unique" should be "The need for an anchor id to be unique"

Frames and popups—just say no

As with previous articles, this is personal bias. There are good uses for them, the article should not presume the user is a idiot or otherwise have such narrow minded target audience. Frames/Popus having been missued in the distant past is no excuse to discard/ignore/vandalise them.

This is a great course and I'm learning a lot. Thanks for taking the time to research, write and support.

The articles inspired me to run my website through the W3C link checker (amongst doing other good things).

My question is "are broken URI fragments a problem?" The normal operation of the site doesn't seem to be affected although I'm wondering if google page rank is affected (my site is writen SEF and yet seems stuck at PR2 even though alexa is rising nicely though 650K now).

As I understand it, the google spider would follow these links and find only styling fragments but no content. Therefore the ranking engine would never get to see the keyword rich content.

Here is the W3C linkchecker report detail:

(The only box I ticked was the "check linked documents recursively" and I set this to ten levels.)

W3C linkchecker returned the following report

2001Some of the links to this resource point to broken URI fragments (such as index.html#fragment).

error Lines: 74, 75, 76, 77, 157, 290, 291, 292, 293, 294, 295, 297, 299, 308, 315, 326, 337, 348, 357, 367, 376, 386, 396, 406, 417, 427, 436, 446, 456 http://www.my-own-site.com/
Status: 200 OK

Some of the links to this resource point to broken URI fragments (such as index.html#fragment).
Broken fragments:

* http://www.my-own-site.com/#ja-content (line 74)
* http://www.my-own-site.com/#ja-col1 (line 76)
* http://www.my-own-site.com/#ja-mainnav (line 75)
* http://www.my-own-site.com/#ja-col2 (line 77)



Any comments appreciated

Post edited Thursday, 18. June 2009, 23:48:52

Thanks for this very extensive article about links, but I´m misssing something about the rel attribut.

Thanks for the sanity check re the URI fragments Chris, one of my objectives in working through this course is to build up my own capability to fix them The question was to ensure that I really did have a problem in the first place.

I'm hoping by the time I complete HTML and CSS sections, that I'll have the knowledge to fix it.