Today's edition will cover what can be considered the most important tag of HTML. This tag, which defines the H and the T (hypertext), is the <a> anchor tag.

This tag takes on several forms. Two of the most common are hyperlinking and anchoring.

A hyperlink is an immediate jump to another resource, which can be relative or absolute and use a number of different protocols, like HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, file, GOPHER, SVN, AIM, mailto, and more.

A hyperlink will look something like this:
<a href="[address]">[text]</a>

The "address" is where the link goes, and the "text" gets displayed to the viewer (generally in blue and underlined).

Since the Nintendo DSi browser only supports HTTP and HTTPS (and file - to an extent), I will focus on those. HTTP stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol. (The S in HTTPS refers to "secure". This is the standard for serving webpages. Linking to webpages can be relative or absolute.

Relative addresses take the current page's location on the server and look in a folder for the linked file, based on where it is in the file structure in relation to the current page. Examples of relative addresses are "home.html" (same folder), "files/blog.php" (down one folder), and "../index.php" (up one folder). A relative link could look simple like so:

<a href="index.php">Homepage</a>

Absolute links are where things can get complicated. They are structured as follows for HTTP(S):

1 protocol (http)
://
2 subdomains (twiiter)
.
3 domain (wiioperasdk)
.
4 top-level domain (com)
[.]/
5 folder (ds)
/
6 file (index.php)

Put that all together, and you have:

<a href="http://twiiter.wiioperasdk.com/ds/index.php"> TWiiter </a>

Additional information can be strung on the end of the address, called query strings and anchors. Query strings start with a "?". I will cover those in a later lesson. Anchors start with "#". Let's cover those now:

You may have used anchors without even knowing it. If you've ever been to a website like Wikipedia and clicked the table of contents for an article, it will jump you down the page. This jump takes you to a hidden anchor. Here is how you set one up:

Table of Contents<br>
1. <a href="#one">Chapter 1</a><br>
2. <a href="#two">Chapter 2</a><br>

...

<a name="one">Chapter 1

...

<a name="two">Chapter 2

And there you have it!

The next few lessens will cover additional basic HTML tags. Then we will dig into stylesheets.