Intrasite, Extrasite, and Email Links

9/30/99HTML's anchor tag, <A>, provides the ability to create hyperlinks to other document. In general there are four types of links, intrasite, extrasite, email and intradocument links. This page shows the first three of these. Extrasite links are links that lead to web documents that reside on other servers. Extrasite links are always begin with http://, ftp://, or gopher://. These three prefixes define the type of server you will be accessing. The following three links are examples.

Extrasite Links

• http://www.tech.purdue.edu
• ftp://somesite.com
• gopher://somesite.com

Intrasite Links
Intrasite links are links to other pages on the current server. Intrasite links can be in the form of relative links or absolute links. Absolute links are written much like Extrasite links, beginning with http://, ftp:// or gopher://. However, relative links are different and provide a shorthand method of referencing other pages in the current site. For example:

• This link references the main reference articles home page, which is one step up in the directory structure of my private folder.
• This link references a page that is one step up in the directory structure, and then one step down into the folder called javascript.
• This link references a page that is one step up in the directory structure, and then two steps down into the folder called textures/bone/.
• This link references a page that is in the same directory as this web page.

Email links are created by entering mailto: and a valid email address into the SRC attribute. If the user has Internet Explorer or Netscape set up to view mail, the link will make their email program automatically pop-up with the specified email address in a new message.

• Email me!