Lesson 4:  Hyperlinks

Earlier we said that web pages are interconnected through HyperText Links or simply Hyperlinks or Hotlinks. Hyperlinks enable you to move between web pages and web sites. It is the hyperlinks in web pages that make the world wide web a true web. You have already been following hyperlinks to get to this lesson by clicking on the menu items at the bottom of every lesson. In this lesson, we will elaborate more on hyperlinks.

A hyperlink could be text or graphics(picture). How do we know that a text or a graphics is a hyperlink? Simple. Move your cursor over it and if it is a link, your cursor would turn into a hand with a pointing finger. or Move your cursor over this text. Note that the color of the text is blue and it is underlined. When you move the cursor over it, you will see a hand. That is the case in most text hyperlinks. However, some people use colors other than blue for text hyperlinks. To make sure that a text is a hyperlink, you will have to move your cursor over it.

Let us try the same with the following picture.        Pictures are used as hyperlinks in web pages that provide some kind of menu. Of course pictures look a lot prettier than text and that is why one is tempted to use pictures as hyperlinks.

Let us now see how we select a hyperlink. As you are already used to it by now, you select a hyperlink by moving the cursor over it and when the cursor turns into a hand you press the left button of your mouse (or you click once). Let us practice with the following text -'click here'- and picture. Click on one of them and see what happens.

Click here              or the following picture                         

Welcome back! If you clicked on one of the hyperlinks you went to another web page which instructed you to click on a text to come back here. If you look at the text hyperlink, its color has changed to pink. With most hyperlinks, pink is a colour for visited hyperlinks.

Sometimes a web page referenced by the hyperlink may have other hyperlinks to web pages of similar content. Therefore, one could easily get lost in a series of hyperlinks or "lost in cyberspace", as it is known. To get back to the original web page, you may have to click on the web browser's back button several times, unless there is a hyperlink that takes you directly to the original web page.

We have seen that web pages reference(link to) each other through hyperlinks. What is actually referenced is the address of the web page on the world wide web or addresses of any other Internet resource. Our next lesson deals with web page addresses, called Uniform (Universal) Resource Locators (URLs).