As I am sure many of you already know, the HTML Anchor tag
is used to create a hyper link to other web pages. Do you know
that the anchor tag may also be used to link to another location
on the same web page or to send an email to someone? These
versatile capabilities are an ideal and simple way to add a bit of
professionalism to your web page or to gather messages from
your visitors.
The normal format for the Anchor tag is:
\click here\ where
www.aurl.com is the URL address of a page you want to link to
when a visitor presses the "click here" text. To use this tag to
send an email, replace the URL "http://www.aurl.com" with the
email address that you wish to send the message to. You must
also precede the email address with the "mailto:" keyword. The
format to send an email to this list address would consequently
be \Contact IMS Web Tips\
. When your visitor presses the highlighted text, it
will display their email program with the web tips address
already included. All they have to do is add the subject and
message and then press the send button.
You can also automatically add the subject to the message by
appending "?Subject=Subscribe" (where "subscribe" can be any
subject). If you wish to write the contents you can append
"?Body=message" (where message is the "contents" of the
email). To compose the entire email for the visitor try this
format using the ampersand "&" to concatenate mailto options:
Space characters in the Subject or Body may cause problems.
Use the escape sequence "%20" without the quotes to add
spaces.
If you have a large web page you may wish to create a link to a
topic or location on the page using a local anchor. This can be
done by naming your anchor and then creating a link to it using
the special pound "#" positioning symbol. The format for a
named anchor is: \topic 1\. You can
position this tag anyplace on your page you like. To create a
local link, enter the anchor tag: \Go to topic 1\.
If you create a list of topics at the top of your page, clicking this
link will take the visitor to the location of the "topic1" anchor.
To create a link to the topic from any other page you would
simply use the full URL of the page with the "#topic1" local
URL appended to it. \Go to topic 1\.
A great place to use these types of anchors is on long multi topic
web pages. You can assign each topic an anchor then create a
table of contents that links to them. An example is:
As a final note, I have experienced problems opening my Mail
Program using 'mailto:' when not using my default browser. I
have also been told that there may be a problem using 'mailto:' if
you are an AOL user. Please feel free to let me know if you have
had any problems using a 'mailto:' link.
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