Matthew MacDonald - Creating Web Sites: The Missing Manual

DHTML

dynamic pages 2nd

events 2nd

forms

functions

history of

line breaks

resources

scripts

categories

spaces

variables

window resizing

JPEG files

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Mary Anne Weeks Mayo was the production editor for Creating Web Sites: The Missing Manual . Marlowe Shaeffer and Claire Cloutier provided quality control. Johnna VanHoose Dinse indexed the book.

Marcia Friedman designed the cover of this book, based on a series design by David Freedman. Marcia Friedman produced the cover layout with Adobe InDesign CS using Adobe's Minion and Gill Sans fonts.

David Futato designed the interior layout, based on a series design by Phil Simpson. This book was converted by Keith Fahlgren to FrameMaker 5.5.6 with a format conversion tool created by Erik Ray, Jason McIntosh, Neil Walls, and Mike Sierra that uses Perl and XML technologies. The text font is Adobe Minion; the heading font is Adobe Formata Condensed; and the code font is LucasFont's TheSans Mono Condensed. The illustrations that appear in the book were produced by Robert Romano, Jessamyn Read, and Lesley Borash using Macromedia FreeHand MX and Adobe Photoshop CS.

As you already know, the essential idea behind the HTML standard is tags specialized codes in angle brackets that tell the browser how to format text, when to insert images, and how to link different documents together. Throughout this book, you've examined just about every important HTML tag that's in use today. Now you're ready for a quick reference that can refresh your memory and help you find the information you need elsewhere in this book.

The anchor tag has two roles. The most common use of the tag is to create a link that, when clicked, takes a visitor from one page to another. To insert this type of link, you supply the destination URL using the href attribute, and put the clickable link text between the opening and closing tags.

The href can be relative (which means it points to a page in your own Web site) or absolute (which means it includes a full URL starting with "http://"). For a review of the differences and when to use each type, see

Creating clickable image links is just as easy as creating clickable text links. The trick is to put an tag inside an tag, like this:

Finally, you can create a link that doesn't transfer the visitor to a new page, but instead pops up an email message with the address information filled in. You do this by creating a mail-to link, as shown here:

For more information about the ins and outs of the mail-to link, see

Anchors can also take a target attribute, which instructs the browser to open the destination page in a specific frame, or in a new browser window (as shown here).

You can learn about this technique on ).

The anchor tag also lets you create a bookmark in a specific spot on a page. Once you've created a bookmark, you can create a link that heads straight to your bookmark.

To create a bookmark, you use the anchor tag, but with a difference. You don't supply the href attribute, because the anchor doesn't lead anywhere. You also don't put any text inside the anchor, because it's not clickable. Instead, all you supply is a name attribute that gives your bookmark a descriptive name. Here's an example:Pet Canaries

Once you've created a bookmark, you can write a URL that points to that bookmark. The trick is that you need to add the bookmark information to the end of the URL. To do this, you add the number sign symbol (#) followed by the bookmark name, as shown here:

You can learn more about bookmarks and ordinary links in

The acronym tag lets you give the full version of an abbreviation. For example, wouldn't your visitors like to know that the hipster slang AFAIK stands for "as far as I know"? You can provide this information like this:

On your Web page, the information in the title attribute doesn't appear right away. But it's available for automated programs that scan Web pages, and more interestingly, many Web browsers (including Internet Explorer) show the full title text in a pop-up text box if you hover over the acronym.

If you use the tag, consider applying some style sheet formatting to make sure your acronym appears differently from the rest of the body text (perhaps with a different background color). That way, the visitor will know there's some extra information waiting to be uncovered with a mouseover.

An occasionally used tag that identifies contact information (like a Web or postal address). Here's an example:

Most browsers format addresses in italics, just as though you used th