As many of you know, we are working as fast as we can on
Version 2 of our IMS products. One of the new features we have
already incorporated into our in house development version is an
automatic link manager. The link manager will recognize the
majority of HTML links that you type into the text editor and
will automatically flag them to construct an anchor when you
preview and publish. You will also be able to click on the link to
open the Link Editor which has been updated so that you can
select, store, save, import, export and edit a library of links that
can be used globally by all your IMS projects and most mail
programs.
The ability to add links within a text Object is a feature many of
you have been asking for. Although this update will be
extremely useful when it becomes available in the near future,
many of you want to be able to do it now. With a little
knowledge of the HTML format it is quite easy to ad links
within your existing text Object. I wrote the following article
over 9 months ago to explain exactly how to do it.
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As most of you probably know, IMS Web Engine, Web Spinner
(and Web Dwarf) allow you to assign a HTML link to any
Object by using the Object Editor Link Dialog. This is simple
and convenient. When you create a multi-page project the
Editor's ability to keep track of internal links even after you
change a page name is especially useful.
Sometimes however, you may want to enter a link directly inside
a text Object. Creating a separate Object for multiple links can
be tedious to set up and maintain. A more convenient method is
to enter a link inside a Text, HTML or Rich Text Object. With a
little knowledge of HTML this can be easily accomplished.
A HTML link is created with the Anchor Tag. The tag itself
specifies the URL to be linked to and surrounds a text or picture
that the user can click on. The format is:
<A HREF="http://www.awebpage.com"a>click here</a>. The
Tag starts with <a. The URL to link to is enclosed in quotes
following the href= command. The text that the user clicks on is
between the a> (Greater Than) bracket and the anchor
terminating tag </aa>.
To create a list of links within a Text or HTML Object, you
would simply combine multiple anchors. I have posted an
example on the IMS Web Tips site. When entering text into
a HTML Object, you can use the a<bra> tag to start a new line.
As I mentioned in a previous newsletter, I do not normally
recommend that you mix Rich Text and HTML tags. The reason
is that IMS converts the Rich Text format to HTML when you
Export or Publish your project. If you change a Rich Text format
such as the Font Size or Color within a HTML tag, the
conversion will mix the two tags producing incorrect code. If
you are careful not to change any format within a HTML tag, it
is possible however, to mix the two formats successfully. If you
do decide to add HTML code when editing Rich Text and end
up with an error, you can often correct the problem by changing
the Object to HTML format, exiting the editor, re-entering the
Editor and then changing the format back to Rich Text again.
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