Relative links are what we will use most of the time and these are links that are in the same locality as each other e.g.
if your root folder was called my_site and it resided on www.trevsfiles.com and inside it you had 3 pages imaginatively
called page1.html, page2.html and page3.html - let's assume you are currently on page2.html and you want to link to
page3.html. To achieve this you would use <a href="page3.html">page3</a> to target the page, this is a relative or
local link as the pages all reside in the same directory.
In other words you are using the full address to achieve
the same aim.
Why would you do this? well maybe you wish to link to another site on the web or to a file that may reside on a different server, generally speaking we will use relative links.
How do I make a link?
Making a link is very easy - all you need to do is select on the stage the object (text or an image) that you want to attach the link to and then look in the property inspector for the box that says link. Just type the name of the link into the box e.g. page1.html or www.trevsfiles.com/my_site/page1.html or click the browse icon, which is situated just to the right of the link box and select the file from your site and that's it!
How do I make a link open in new window?
There are a couple of small steps involved in this process and it involves first creating a null link - more on this in a second and then attaching a behaviour to the null link - more on this in 2 seconds.
Right - first a null link is a link that doesn't actually do anything (sounds useful) and it is achieved by putting the # symbol into the link box. There is a reason why we would want to do this so I'll tell you what it is.
The null link stops the link working and the reason why we would want this to happen is so that we can attch a behaviour to it that will open our link in a new browser window. If we didn't have the null link our page would open twice.
To attach a behaviour we simply open the behaviours panel (from the Window menu at the top of the page and select Behaviours. This opens the panel (if it wasn't already open that is). Now with the panel open you will see a + sign, so click on this and a list will appear - from this list select Open Browser Window and a box will open asking you to input your desire settings regarding the URL you wish to open i.e. the html page you want to display and what size you would like the window to be and a series of other settings e.g. do you want the user to be able to resize your window etc.
Now when you click your link the # sign stops it opening fullscreen and the new window is launched with your chosen html page displayed at the size requested - splendid!
How do I link to a different part of the same page?
This process is also very simply - you use what are called 'named anchors'.
To insert a named anchor you can go to the Insert menu at the top of the page and choose Named Anchor - this will be inserted wherever your cursor is positioned on the page. You give the anchor a name l e.g. halfwaydownthepage then in the property inspector when you insert the link you simply put the # sign followed by the name of your anchor e.g. #halfwaydownthepage and that's it.
You can mix page links with anchors to for example make a link go to a new page and immeditely jump to a designated spot but I'll leave it up to you to experiment and see how this works but if you have any problems just ask and I'll show you how to do it).
What about some of those tutorial movies?
Thought you'ld never ask - there are some walk-throughs just below this text box - all of the links you see on this page are relative links i.e. the target files all reside on this site.
