A (HTML element)

In HTML, the a (for "anchor") element represents a hyperlink, commonly known as a link.

Not to be confused with the link element, which allows authors to link their document to other resources, such as an external style sheet.

Examples

Use a fully-qualified URL when linking to another website:

<a href="http://wikipedia.org">Wikipedia</a>

Document-relative URLs are convenient and widely used in web design.

The simplest case is a link to a destination web page in the same folder:

<a href="destination.html">Destination page</a>

In the example below, the destination page is in a subfolder named sub:

<a href="sub/destination.html">Destination page</a>

In the example below, the destination page is one step closer to the web root:

<a href="../destination.html">Destination page</a>

The example below demonstrates one step closer to the web root, then in a subfolder named sub2:

<a href="../sub2/destination.html">Destination page</a>

Link to a Microsoft Word document by setting the link's href attribute (HTML) to the name of the Word document:

<a href="filename.docx">Download Word document</a>

In this example, the Word document is in the same folder as the web page containing the link.

If the Word document is located elsewhere, modify the href attribute to specify the path to the document:

<a href="../documents/filename.docx">Download Word document</a>