25th May 2001

Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) is the foundation of the Internet. It's what makes your web browser tick by providing a structured set of rules used to format content so it looks good and acts right when links are clicked. These formatting rules are expressed as "tags" in HTML. One such tag is anchor tag <a> - used for links within a page. There are a number of attributes that can be included within the <a> tag in order to force certain behavior when the link is clicked. 'href' defines the URL that you'll be shuffled off to when the link is clicked. Every link has to have one of these babies. However, 'title' embeds an extended comment when the cursor hovers over the link. Use this when you're short on space, but need to provide additional information about the link. It's underused, though extremely valuable. 'target' is used to specify how a link should launch. The 'target' attributes are as follows: "_top" will remove all existing framesets; "_blank" will create a new browser window, which has no name; "_parent" only removes the frameset that directly contains this frame; and "_self" indicates the frame that the document is in. It is the default value for links that do not have a TARGET attribute. Even if YOU aren't an HTML coder, I bet you know of a site which could make good use of these attributes.