How to link.

The message referenced above.

Rob

Thanks Rob, I did have it working but I deleted a blank line underneath the link and that broke it for some reason.

Alan

To create a link, you type this:

<a href="http://www.google.com">Google Main Page</a>

and that creates this:

Google Main Page


To open that link in a new window, you type this:

<a href="http://www.google.com/" target="_blank">Google Main Page</a>

to get this:

Google Main Page


How do I include HTML characters in my post so that they show up as chacters rather than generate HTML code?

You use the HTML ampersand (&) codes in place of the character itself. For instance, to get the

<

to appear, but not be interpreted as HTML, you type

&#60

If you type this, and then submit your post to the Sony forum, all you will get is the

<

character, and it will NOT be interpreted as HTML code. You then do this for every other special character in the HTML syntax.

Now, don't even think of asking me how I got &#60 to appear above instead of just the < character.

Here are many of the codes

 &#38 &

 &#34 "

 &#47 /   slash 

 &#48- 9  digits 0-9 

 &#58 :   colon 

 &#59 ;   semicolon 

 &#60 <   less-than sign 

 &#61 =   equals sign 

 &#62 >   greater-than sign 

 &#63 ?   question mark 

 &#64 @   at sign 

 &#65- &#90;  uppercase letters A-Z 

 &#91 [   left square bracket 

 &#92 \   backslash 

 &#93 ]   right square bracket 

 &#94 ^   caret 

 &#95 _   horizontal bar (underscore) 

 &#96 `   grave accent 

 &#97- &#122;  lowercase letters a-z 

 &#123 {   left curly brace 

 &#124 |   vertical bar 

 &#8226 bullet

Thanks John, I actually used your example from 15th June by cutting and pasting. This worked until I deleted a blank line. I think sometimes if you remove a character from the end of the link then other characters in the string change. Particularly " changes to &quote or something like (can't remember the exact format)

Alan

John, for what it's worth it's not best practice to use ID numbers in HTML code because they can vary from platform to platform. These days the convention is to use shorthand codes instead.

So for example < (less than) is written as < and > (greater than) is written as >

The & (ampersand symbol) is & and so on.

Stuart:

ASCII codes vary from platform to platform?

When did this happen.

Jack

No, the HTML codes don't always get interpreted, or interpreted correctly, in some browsers. It's as if some browser developers forgot about them. FWIW, using standard short-hand (like © for a copyright symbol ©, e.g.) seems to suit every browser.

Jack,

>When did this happen.<

It's been like that for ages. As grh mentions, browsers just can't be relied upon to display characters written with numeric entities.

The stupid thing is that the HTML coded character set written in decimal or hex formats (numeric entities - the numbers posted earlier) is supposed to be W3C compliant, but lots of browsers will only reliably render special characters when written in character entity format, which had limited support in HTML v2 - just the common characters - but is now the design "standard" in v4. It also depends on the doctype declared and how a browser (and OS) interprets that, which is often what trips up numeric entities.

Actually, my experience has been that all browsers display numeric code entities perfectly well as long as they are terminated with a semicolon, which is required by the W3C standard. Unfortunately, Microsoft not only allows the semicolon to be left out, but in fact encourages web developers to do so, against the W3C standard. Of course, following Microsoft's policy ends up creating pages that do not render properly in non-Microsoft browsers, which leads to having more people have to use MSIE in order to view those pages. Hmmmmmmmm.

Just remember to always terminate the codes with semicolons, which one is supposed to do anyway, and they'll render fine across all platforms.

Google Main Page is Here

O.K. I struggle creating links on the fly so I was just testing a little application that I have written.

It makes life so much easier for me.

Step 1. Enter the URL (don't need to include the http:// or the www.)
Step 2. Enter a caption or description of where the link will take you.
Step 3. Paste the link into your thread.
Step 4. There is no step 4. That's it.

Now if I had somebody to host it, I could use it to create a link to their server and then we could all share it. (10kb zipped) :~)

Alan

AlanC, I know how to make the hyperlinks already... but if you have a quick little tool for doing this, it would be nice.

I can host it if you'd like, just shoot me an email with it. You can send it to:

kevin @ therapyplayground . com

NoteTab is a free text editor that will create correct html for you and even check your code with Tidy (a code-checker created within the w3c community by Dave Raggett).

Here is what the creators say about NoteTab:

The ultimate free Notepad replacement and a handy HTML editor. Handle a heap of files with a simple tabbed interface. Search files, strip HTML tags and format text quickly. Build libraries of text macros to speed up your work. Formerly called "Super NoteTab". 100% freeware -- no ads and no nags.

Find it at NoteTab.com

Tor