University of Missouri - St. Louis Summer Institute 2002
June 4, 2002, 2:30pm - 4:00pm ; June 12, 2002, 2:30pm - 4:00pm

Creating Online Bibliographies
About Links and URLs

by Raleigh Muns (muns@umsl.edu)

URL = Uniform Resource Locator

A URL is a unique identifier for a document on the World Wide Web.

Example:

http://www.umsl.edu/library/index.html

Hypertext Link

A hypertext link uses a URL. Using Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), a link with a URL would look like this:

A web browser (e.g., Internet Explorer, Netscape, Opera, Lynx, etc.) will ONLY display the text (e.g., "UM-St. Louis Libraries") and not the link. When the user clicks on the linked text, the browser will attempt to load the document identified by the URL.

In the example above, a user clicking on UM-St. Louis Libraries will have the specific file index.html, which is the UMSL Library Home Page, loaded into their browser.

When you access pages and documents on the World Wide Web, the URL is normally displayed in a box at the top of your web browser. The box may be labeled "address" or "location" or may not be labeled at all. In many cases, you may copy this URL and make your own links. Most web creation software (e.g., MacroMedia's Dreamweaver™) will allow you to just paste such URL's into a box automatically creating the sort of hypertext link to the UMSL Libraries above.

There are some problems, in doing this, however. The biggest issue revolves around the problem of Stability of Links.