What is a Hyperlink?

Hyperlinks are the backbone of the Web. They provide a means to connect one piece of information (a web page, for example) to another piece of information. If you have designed two web pages, a hyperlink will provide a quick way to jump from one page to the other. If you have one long web pages, a hyperlink can be used as a bookmark to help people jump from one part of the page to another, and back again. You already know what a hyperlink looks like on a web page - to get this far, you've already clicked on many of them. But what follows is a brief explanation of what happens when you click those links.

Hyperlinks - the technical stuff

When you click on a hyperlink, this is what happens.

Your browser gathers the information about the link and sends the request to something called a naming server. The naming server translates the link text (www.homeandlearn.co.uk, for example) into a series of numbers. These numbers are called the IP address. These are needed because computers don't speak in a written language. So the computer needs something it can understand. An IP address is a set of four numbers separated by full stops. Each set of numbers is between 0 and 255. So when you click the link, the text address will be translated into an IP address, something like 213.209.156.97.

The IP address will be used to identify a particular computer. If the computer, usually the naming server, doesn't have the address in its database, it will pass the address further up the naming server food chain. If no naming server can find the IP address, the failure is passed back down to your browser. At this stage you'll probably see a 404 error message.

If the address is found, however, the IP address is sent to your browser. The browser then contacts the web server that has the web page you requested. The page is then sent to your browser. However, that's not the end because requests are done one at a time. If the web pages has images, the browser will see this and then request that the images be brought back to the web page as well. One image at a time.

Uniform Resource Locator

A uniform resource locator, or URL, is commonly called an address. The URL of our web Page is http://www.homeandlearn.co.uk/ Let's break this down a bit.

http://
http stands for hypertext transfer protocol. A protocol is a set of standards that one computer uses to speak to another. There are quite a lot of different protocols. For web communications, the two most common protocols are hypertext transfer protocol and file transfer protocol (FTP). There's another layer of protocols underneath this called Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP). The http in a web address is followed by a colon and two forward slashes.

www.homeandlearn.co.uk
This is the Domain Name, the part that gets translated into an IP address. The domain name is split into three parts, separated by full stops.

www
the host name

homeandlearn
the enterprise domain name

co.uk
the top-level internet domain name. Others are .com (commercial), .org (organisation), .gov (government)

/
If no html page is specified, the forward slash tells the server to look for the default web page. This is usually index.html. The index.html page is one that you have created. That's why naming the first page of your internet site index.html is so important.

OK, we've learnt what a link is, and what happens when you click one, but let's see how to create them.

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