Introduction To HTML Anchor Tag

Anchor tag is an HTML tag that is used to mark the beginning and end of a hyperlink text in the HTML document.

A website is made up of one or more HTML documents that contains all the information parts of the website. But word wide web as a whole mainly works because of the ability of these HTML web documents to link (or refer) to each other. This inter-linking of web pages is achieved by using the HTML anchor tags.

A typical structure of an anchor tag looks like this:

<a href="https://muddoo.com" title="Muddoo Home">Muddoo</a>

From the above, we note that an anchor tag starts and ends between notations like <a> and </a>. In other words, HTML anchor tags have both opening and closing tags. Text between this opening and closing tags is called the anchor text and is responsible for taking the user to a new document upon being clicked. In the above example, “Muddoo” is the anchor text.

But where does the user go on clicking the Anchor text? This is determined by the href attribute of the HTML anchor tag. The url in the href attribute of anchor tag is the destination web page’s address where the user will be taken to.

In addition to href attribute, the HTML anchor tag also has another attribute called “title”. The title attribute of the HTML anchor tag holds a piece of text that the user will see upon hovered over by the mouse. It is also helpful as an accessibility feature for people using screen readers as it gets read out by the screen readers.

Finally, there are also a few other attributes such as “target” attribute which provides additional functions such as determining if the destination web page is to be opened in the same window or a new window. These type of additional attributes can be looked upon in the official w3c html specification document.

But all in all, the Anchor tags are the fundamental elements of the world wide web that weaves the inter-connected paths between various web documents that helps the web users to seamlessly navigate between various websites and documents without any hassles.

Hope this gave a brief introduction to the HTML anchor tags. HTM Anchor tags are tags that are going to be used regularly while creating a HTML web page so having a clear understanding of its structure and how it works becomes essential. In the same line, I will continue to document more about other HTML tags in the future that are bare essential for web development.

Until then, happy coding!