Tutorial 25: The Care and Feeding of Hyperlinks, Part I
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A different breed of link
The first thing you have to think about is what exactly you want to link to. Before I go into that, I'm going to make a distinction here between navigation links and information links.
A navigation link is a hyperlink that will help the user get to a page that is structurally related to the one he is viewing. If you want an example of such a link, look at the top of this page. The line reading "home / experts / html / tutorials / 25 / 1" contains links to pages that are upwards of this one in the hierarchy here on WebReference.com. The little arrows below and to the left of this line are links to the pages of the tutorial you're reading right now.
Information links are usually embedded within a body of text. For instance, in the beginning of this tutorial, I mentioned Tutorial 2. I made this a link to the tutorial, so that you can read it if you haven't already, or refer to it.
The distinction between links used for navigation and those giving further information is hazy, but there are some important differences. First of all, navigation links are usually followed by the user when he first views a page or after he's done reading all of it. Either way, they offer the user a way out of the page he's reading so that he can continue doing whatever he's been doing while reading the page.
Links that provide information, on the other hand, are primarily used to enhance the semantics of a document and offer more information on the topics discussed.
The rules for creating the two types of links are quite different, and will be discussed separately. However, there are some tenets that you should always stick to. We'll take a look at some of these rules right at the start.
