link

Text or images on a Web page that a user can click on in order to access or connect to another document. Links are most commonly thought of as the technology that connects two Web pages or Web sites. They are most commonly seen on your browser as underlined words (such as "user" "click on" and "access" earlier in this paragraph).

Once you click on a link, it could trigger a variety of events: It could "jump" to a different page or to another place on the same Web page; it could link to a file that will start downloading to your computer; it could trigger the launch of a helper application that will then process the clicked-on file, it could launch your e-mail program so you can send a message, and so on. What actually occurs when you click on a link is determined by the file's MIME type and the way your computer system is configured to handle that MIME type. For example, browsers are configured to display all files that have HTML in their MIME extension.

An absolute link specifies a full URL (for example, https://www.netlingo.com/acronyms.php). In other words, absolute links contain the URL and file name and can be located from anywhere on the Web, not just from within a single website. In contrast, a relative link specifies the name of the file to be linked to only as it is related to the current website (using the above example, a relative link on a page within netlingo.com would be simply acronyms.php).

Links are also referred to as hyperlinks, hypertext, and hot links, and they are coded in HTML by Web page authors or Web developers.