Description

The <a> (short for anchor) tag defines a hyperlink.

An anchor i.e. the <a> element can be used in two ways:

  • To create a link to another document, by using the href attribute.
  • To create a bookmark inside a document, by using the id attribute.

The following table summarizes the usages context and the version history of this tag.

Placement:Inline
Content:Inline, and text
Start/ End Tag:Start tag: required , End tag: required
Version:HTML 2, 3.2, 4, 4.01, 5
<a href="https://www.w3.org/">W3C Website</a>

This link designates the home page of the 'World Wide Web Consortium' website. When a user click on it, the web browser will retrieve the resource, in this case, an HTML document.

Note: The most important attribute of the <a> tag is the href attribute, which indicates the destination of an hyperlink.

By default, links will appear as follows in most of the browsers:

  • An unvisited link is underlined and blue.
  • A visited link is underlined and purple.
  • An active link is underlined and red.

However you can overwrite this using CSS. Learn more about styling links.

Syntax

The basic syntax of the <a> tag is given with:

HTML/XHTML:* <a href\="*URL*"> ... </a>

The example below shows the <a> tag in action.

<a href="https://www.tutorialrepublic.com/">Tutorial Republic</a>
<a href="kites.jpg"><img src="kites-thumb.jpg" alt="kites"></a>
<a href="https://www.google.com/">Google Search</a>

Tag-Specific Attributes

The following table shows the attributes that are specific to the <a> tag.

Global Attributes

Like all other HTML tags, the <a> tag supports the global attributes in HTML5.

Event Attributes

The <a> tag also supports the event attributes in HTML5.

Browser Compatibility

Element
<a>YesYesYesYesYes