About Hyperlinks in HTML...
= Index DOT Html by Brian Wilson [bloo@blooberry.com] =

Justification for Hyperlinks

Hyperlinks are the heart of HTML. They allow the linking together of remote documents with the convenience of a click or other activation mechanism. Hyperlinks are used to establish a relationship two documents: a source (usually the current document) and the destination. The destination of a hyperlink jump can be either an entire document or a specific location within a document. In addition, a hyperlink can serve as either a destination of a URL (using the NAME attribute), the jump point to another document (using the HREF attribute), or both at the same time.

The A tag has other attributes as well (such as TARGET) which serve to further communicate information about the source and destination documents.

Absolute Vs. Relative URLs

A hyperlink destination is given as a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) using this general format:
[protocol]://[network location ID]/[path on machine]/[file name]#[internal document location]
This is only a general format for specifying a URL - There are many variations within this framework (such as a "mailto" URL), and portions of the format can be omitted (such as the [internal document location].) Please see RFC1738 for more details on URLs.

The path to a document can ALSO be specified relative to the originating document. In such cases, the [protocol] and [network location ID] portions of the above syntax are omitted and [path on machine] is given relative to the current file.

Official References

ftp://ds.internic.net/rfc/rfc1866.txt

RFC 1866: The HTML 2.0 specification (plain text)

http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/MarkUp/html-spec

The web version of the HTML 2.0 (RFC 1866) specification

http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/MarkUp/Wilbur/

The HTML 3.2 (Wilbur) proposal
[Includes all HTML 2 character elements and newer formatting elements in common use]

http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/MarkUp/Cougar/HTML.dtd

The experimental HTML (Cougar) draft
[Demonstrates some of the directions HTML is taking]

ftp://ds.internic.net/rfc/rfc1738.txt

RFC 1738: Uniform Resource Locators (URL)
[RFC explaining different allowed URL protocols]

ftp://ds.internic.net/rfc/rfc1808.txt

RFC 1808: Relative Uniform Resource Locators
[Another RFC explaining different allowed URL protocols]

http://home.netscape.com/eng/mozilla/2.0/relnotes/demo/target.html

Netscape Frames Discussion Document - Targeting Windows

http://www.microsoft.com/workshop/author/newhtml/htmlr020.htm

Internet Explorer 3.0 Tag reference
[Details hyperlink usage including common extensions]

Other Related Links

http://www.yahoo.com/....../URIs___Universal_Resource_Identifiers/

Yahoo's UR* index