6.4. URIs and link targets: where hyperlinks point

The basic addressing scheme for the World Wide Web is the Universal Resource Identifier or URI. For example, the URI of the New Mexico Tech homepage is “http://www.nmt.edu/”.

In general, a URI has as many as four parts:

method://host/path#fragment

method

The method name describes the general protocol for retrieving resources. Most Web pages use method http, which stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol. There are many others, such as ftp: for File Transfer Protocol.

host

This portion describes a specific host machine. For example, www.nmt.edu is a specific processor that serves Web pages.

path

Describes a specific document on the host machine.

fragment

Refers to a specific location in the document. If there is no “#” symbol, the URI refers to the beginning of the document.

In an XHTML document, a fragment identifier refers to the element that has that id attribute. For example, if a document contained this paragraph, the fragment identifier “#mongooses” would point there:

  <p id='mongooses'>
    The plural of "mongoose" is "mongooses," not "mongeese."
    The word is Hindic in origin, so it does not follow the rule
    for "goose."
  </p>

Building web pages with XHTML 1.1

6.4. URIs and link targets: where hyperlinks point