HTML authors use the <a> tag most commonly with its href attribute to create a hypertext link, or hyperlink, for short, to another place in the same document or to another document. In these cases, the current document is the source of the link; the value of the href attribute, a URL, is the target.
You may run across the terms “head” and “tail,” which reference the target and source of a hyperlink. This naming scheme assumes that the referenced document (the head) has many tails that are embedded in many referencing documents throughout the Web. We find this naming convention confusing and stick to the concept of source and target documents throughout this book.
The other way you can use the <a> tag is with the name attribute to mark a hyperlink target, or fragment identifier, in an HTML document.
It is possible to use both the name and href attributes within a single <a> tag, defining a link to another document and a fragment identifier within the current document. We recommend against this, since it overloads a single tag with multiple functions, and some browsers may not be able to handle it.
Instead, use two <a> tags when such a need arises. Your HTML source will be easier to understand and modify, and will work better across a wider range of browsers.
Allowed content
Between the <a> tag and its required end tag, you may put only regular text, line breaks, images, and headings. The browser renders all of these elements normally, but with the addition of some special effects to indicate that it is a hyperlink to another document. For instance, the popular graphical browsers typically underline and color the text and draw a colored border around images that are enclosed by <a> tags.
While the allowed content may seem restricted (the inability to place style markup within an <a> tag is a bit onerous, for instance), most browsers let you put just about anything within an <a> tag that makes sense. To be compliant with the HTML standard, place the <a> tag inside other markup tags, not the opposite. For example, while most browsers make sense of either variation on this anchor theme:
To subscribe to <cite><a href="ko.html">Kumquat Online</a></cite>, To subscribe to <a href="ko.html"><cite>Kumquat Online</cite></a>,
only the first example is technically correct.
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