I want to create a hyperlink to a part in a long html page.
The page: https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Shell-Parameter-Expansion.html
I want to create a link to the part where this gets explained: ${parameter/pattern/string}.
While it is possible to link to a specific part of a page, you need to have an identifier to link to.
There is no way to design a link that points to an arbitrary position on a third-party page.
Unfortunately, it's not possible to create links to arbitrary parts of a web page.
Fragments ("anchors") that are intended to be linked to can be designated by assigning id attribute to their tags. That elements can be referenced using fragment part of URI, i.e. the part after #.
<p id="first">First paragraph</p>
<p id="second">Second paragraph</p>
<p>Third paragraph</p>
First two paragraphs can be linked to using http://somewhere/.../#first and http://somewhere/.../#second URIs, whereas it's not possible to target third paragraph, as it does not have id attribute.
Related
I tried to search the web about what is the purpose of the HTML <var> Tag and didn't find any good explanation or let say I'm not satisfied yet. I can read what they say about it but I don't understand the purpose. I tried two different lines of code and both gives me the same thing now I need to know what exactly is <var> and why we should use it rather than a single style.
<var>y</var> = <var>m</var><var>x</var> + <var>b</var>
<p style='font-style:italic'>y = mx + b</p>
Reference to name only one: https://html.com/tags/var/
Funny because I read the explanation but I still don't see what is the use of <var> other than just making the text italic!
Here is how W3Schools defines HTML:
HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language
HTML is the standard markup language for creating Web pages
HTML describes the structure of a Web page
HTML consists of a series of elements
HTML elements tell the browser how to display the content
HTML elements label pieces of content such as "this is a heading", "this is a paragraph", "this is a link", etc.
The way I see it is that, even though <var> and <i> have the same output printed to the browser, they mean different things, specially if you are "reading" pages without opening a browser like search engines do.
Check it is not particular to the example you mentioned. Look at the example on <b> and <strong> (https://www.w3schools.com/html/html_formatting.asp). They also have the same output but mean different things.
Semantics.
<p> tags are generic paragraph elements, typically used for text.
<var> elements represent the name of a variable in a mathematical expression or a programming context.
If you italicize a paragraph it may resemble the default styling of the <var> element, but that's where the similarities end. Also, they're different to screen readers.
Here's an example using both elements and you can see that semantically, it's a paragraph of text that contains references to variables in a mathematical sense:
<p>The volume of a box is <var>l</var> × <var>w</var> × <var>h</var>, where <var>l</var> represents the length, <var>w</var> the width and <var>h</var> the height of the box.</p>
Is it possible to make an <a href> link to the same page when your destination doesn't have an ID?
Jump to Topic 1
...
<!--destination is below-->
<h1 class="tab-title" data-editor-style="title" style="color:#444444">Topic 1</h1>
Sadly, the answer is no. You need an ID or at least a name, like CBroe mentioned in a comment of your question.
However, I found this here:
Today, all browsers recognize top as being the top of the page. If you
want the visitor to go to the very top of the page, the ID tag can be
left out and the A HREF link will still work.
A URL fragment identifier can only target an element with a matching ID, or a corresponding named anchor. You cannot link to arbitrary elements without IDs. (There was a proposal that would have allowed the use of CSS selectors as fragment identifiers, in which I was personally involved, but it never took off.)
The best you can do is to use JavaScript to select the element you want and give it an ID that is reserved for your hyperlink. If the elements matching this selector will change then you will additionally have to listen for such changes and handle them accordingly, but that's probably beyond the scope of this question.
I know that linking in general looks like
examplesite.com
I was wondering how would someone link within the page it self. Sort of like when someone clicks on biography section in Wikipedia and it scrolls down to the part that has the biography but staying on the same page.
Any example could would be great.
I believe that you're referring to URL fragments (a.k.a. named anchors or bookmark links).
You'd create such a link like:
Jump to example
Which would take you to the part of the page where the element with the ID of example exists. Like:
<h1 id="example">example</h1>
In older versions of HTML, the name attribute was first used for this, however the ID has replaced that.
What you posted is actually a link inside a website. It does not contain a protocol such as http:// nor starts with // which would indicate a protocol-relative link, so it would load exampleside.com relative to whatever path you are currently on.
These are the kind of links you can use (each inside href="..."). We assume that you are currently on http://example.net/foo/index.html
https://example.com - goes to the "external" site https://example.com
//example.com - goes to the "external" site xxx://example.com with xxx being the protocol used to load example.net, so in my example http://example.com
www.example.com - goes to http://example.net/foo/www.example.com as it is not an external link
#foo - goes to the element with id="foo" on the current site (does not load anything from the server)
So what you want is probably the last example: ... and then id="foo" on the element you want to jump to.
Add some id to the element you want to link to, e.g
<div id="target">Hello</div>
Then you can link it by using #:
Go to target
Go to target
<hr style="height: 300vh" />
<div id="target">Hello</div>
Total newbie question, but I cant figure out what im doing wrong. I want a make a link that jumps down the page to a header. I believe these are called fragment links. Here is my code thats not working:
My Link
<div id="cont">
<p>Lots of content here, abbreviated in this example to save space</p>
<h2 id="Frag">Header I want to jump to</h2>
</div>
Pretty sure you need to specify the name attribute for an anchor to work, for example:
Skip to content
<div name="content" id="content"></div>
Okay, so 'pretty sure' was a euphemism for 'guess' and I thought I'd look it up, so, from the HTML 4.01 Specification we get this from section 12.2.3 Anchors with the id attribute:
The id attribute may be used to create an anchor at the start tag of
any element (including the A element). This example illustrates the use of the id attribute to position an anchor in an H2 element. The anchor is linked to via the A element.
You may read more about this in Section Two.
...later in the document
<H2 id="section2">Section Two</H2>
...later in the document
<P>Please refer to Section Two above for more details.`
To carry on the convention of guesswork, perhaps your page isn't long enough to allow jumping to that content (that is, your page might have nowhere to jump and the content to jump to is already visible.)
Other than that, and from the same section of the spec previously linked, here is some general info on when to use what as the anchor identifier (in terms of the link its self) that could be otherwise valuable:
Use id or name? Authors should consider the following issues when
deciding whether to use id or name for an anchor name:
The id attribute can act as more than just an anchor name (e.g., style sheet selector, processing identifier, etc.).
Some older user agents don't support anchors created with the id attribute.
The name attribute allows richer anchor names (with entities).
Your code works fine in firefox anyway you can use as well name instead of id..
http://www.w3schools.com/tags/att_a_name.asp
if you want to have a nice scrolling you can use jquery scroll http://api.jquery.com/scroll/
I'm trying to figure out how to reference another area of a page with Markdown. I can get it working if I add a
<div id="mylink" />
and for the link do:
[My link](#mylink)
But my guess is that there's some other way to do an in-page link in Markdown that doesn't involve the straight up div tag.
Any ideas?
See this answer.
In summary make a destination with
<a name="sometext"></a>
inserted anywhere in your markdown markup (for example in a header:
## heading<a name="headin"></a>
and link to it using the markdown linkage:
[This is the link text](#headin)
or
[some text](#sometext)
Don't use <div> -- this will mess up the layout for many renderers.
(I have changed id= to name= above. See this answer for the tedious explanation.)
I guess this depends on what you're using to generate html from your markdown. I noticed, that jekyll (it's used by gihub.io pages by default) automatically adds the id="" attribute to headings in the html it generates.
For example if you're markdown is
My header
---------
The resulting html will look like this:
<h2 id="my-header">My header</h2>
So you can link to it simply by [My link](#my-header)
With the PHP version of Markdown, you can also link headers to fragment identifiers within the page using a syntax like either of the following, as documented here
Header 1 {#header1}
========
## Header 2 ## {#header2}
and then
[Link back to header 1](#header1)
[Link back to header 2](#header2)
Unfortunately this syntax is currently only supported for headers, but at least it could be useful for building a table of contents.
The destination anchor for a link in an HTML page may be any element with an id attribute. See Links on the W3C site. Here's a quote from the relevant section:
Destination anchors in HTML documents
may be specified either by the A
element (naming it with the name
attribute), or by any other element
(naming with the id attribute).
Markdown treats HTML as HTML (see Inline HTML), so you can create your fragment identifiers from any element you like. If, for example, you want to link to a paragraph, just wrap the paragraph in a paragraph tag, and include an id:
<p id="mylink">Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet...</p>
Then use your standard Markdown [My link](#mylink) to create a link to fragment anchor. This will help to keep your HTML clean, as there's no need for extra markup.
For anyone use Visual Studio Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2015, it really does not like embedded <a> or <div> elements, at least in headers. It also doesn't like emoji in headers either:
### 🔧 Configuration 🔧
Lorem ipsum problem fixem.
Gets translated to:
<h3 id="-configuration-">🔧 Configuration 🔧</h3>
<p>Lorem ipsum problem fixem.</p>
And so links should either use that id (which breaks this and other preview extensions in Visual Studio), or remove the emoji:
Here's [how to setup](#-configuration-) //🔧 Configuration 🔧
Here's [how to setup](#configuration) //Configuration
Where the latter version works both online in TFS and in the markdown preview of Visual Studio.
In Pandoc Markdown you can set anchors on arbitrary spans inside a paragraph using syntax [span]{#anchor}, e.g.:
Paragraph, containing [arbitrary text]{#mylink}.
And then reference it as usual: [My link](#mylink).
If you want to reference a whole paragraph then the most straightforward way is to add an empty span right in the beginning of the paragraph:
[]{#mylink}
Paragraph text.