Go to Lesson #9Go to lesson #11: More With ImagesSpecial Linking Techniques

There are so many things that you can do with links that entire books could be written about the subject. Even without getting into the more complex and special technique, you can do quite a few things.

Link Colors

Links are displayed in three different colors. They begin by showing blue, ten change to violet when they have been clicked (visited), and red when they are active (the active link is the one that will be "clicked" if you press return or enter).

You can change these colors in several different ways. You can specify the colors in the <BODY> tag as shown below. This changes the link colors for all links on the page. 

<body link="#000000" vlink="#800000" 
alink="#FFFF00">

The "link" attribute changes the color of an "unclicked" link, "vlick" changes visited links and "alink" changes active link colors.

You can also use cascading style sheets, which is further described in the CSS section of this web site.

Targeting Your Link

If you are working with frames, sometimes you want your visitors to click on a link, but display the page in another frame, as shown in the diagram to the left. Normally, if you clicked on a link in the frame titled "rleft" it would display in the frame "rleft".

You may want to review the tutorial on frames before going any further.

Okay, to get the desired page to display in a different frame, you specify the name of the frame in the "target" attribute of the "A" tag. Here's an example: 

Display <a href="example-lower_right_hand_pag.htm" 
target="rright">Page 2</a>

This displays on the page as:

Display Page 2

Setting A Title

I'm sure you've seen tool tips on images. You can see an example to the left. The tool top shows up if you hover the cursor over the image for a few seconds, and it displays for a brief time (a minute or so). The idea is to give you some help or additional information about the image.

Did you know that you can also do this with hyperlinks? It's very simple. Just include the TITLE attribute on your "A" tags. An example is shown below. 

Here is an example of a <a href="tutorial010.htm" 
TITLE="You can see the tool tip, right?">tool tip</a>

This displays as shown below. To see the tool tip, hover your cursor over the hyperlink for a few seconds.

Here is an example of a tool tip.