Creating URLs for WELLGopher

This assumes you know a little about what URLs are about; check out Eric Theise's URL introduction.

URLs can either be relative to our server, in which case they can be shorter, or absolute if they point off our server.

Making Relative Links within the server

Links to other HTML files

If you're making a link to an HTML file that's in the very same directory as the HTML file you're modifying, you don't need to qualify the URL at all -- you can just use the name of HTML file. For example, if I wanted to link back to our home page, here's what the last link would look like in HTML:

  to our <A HREF="home.html">home page</A>,

Links to other things in our Gopher server

If you want to make a link to some file or Gopher directory on our server, you don't need to specify the name of the server, but you do need a complete path.

Here's a link to a book review of The Overworked American:

  Here's a link to a book review of 
  <A HREF="/0/WER/Book_Reviews/Overworked_American">
  <cite>The Overworked American</cite></A>:

You can get the bulk of this link by finding what you want to link to with Lynx or Unix Gopher and using the = command to see the information about the item you're pointing to.

Note the use of <cite> to surround the name of the book. This makes it appear in some appropriate form to folks using a W3 broswer like Mosaic.

If you're linking to an entire directory, the URL is almost the same, but instead of a '0' (for text file), you use a '1' on the front to indicate a directory. Here's a link to the Matrix section of WELLGopher, and here's what the HTTP looks like:

   <A HREF="/1/matrix">
the Matrix</A> section

Absolute Links off the server

Now we're into straight URL land. Just include the URL as found in a mail message, or discovered from Gopher or a W3 client.

Here's a Gopher link and a link to another W3 server:

The HTTP for those:

<UL>
<LI> <A HREF="gopher://gopher.msen.com/">MSEN's Gopher</A>
<LI> <A HREF="http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Mosaic/Docs/whats-new.html">
What's new with mosaic</A>
</UL>

ph 19 Jan 94