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What Are Anchors in HTML?

The a (aka anchor) HTML element represents a hyperlink to a web resource (a page, a file, an email, etc.).

The actual hyperlink is placed in the href (which stands for hypertext reference) attribute of the anchor element. The hyperlink label is placed between the anchor tags.

<a href="https://soundof.it">
  The best source of IT Tutorials - soundof.IT
</a>

The href can point not only to pages or files but also to emails (mailto:), phone numbers (tel:) and page sections (#).

Anchor Specific Attributes

The anchor element can be configured with several specific attributes. The most notable of them are:

  • download - indicates to the user agent to download the linked resource instead of displaying it,
  • hreflang - indicates the linked resource language,
  • target - indicates where to display the linked resource (use _blank to open in a new tab),
  • rel - indicates the relationship or relationships with the linked resource (e.g. nofollow, author, license, alternate, next, prev, first, last, external).