Hyper-references in HTML

HTML does its hyper-references using the a element, and elements of the document can be named with either a with a name attribute or with the id attribute applied to any tag. All of this is possible in gloss-generated HTML just as you'd expect. In fact authors are encouraged to use id attribute to define sections of their documents, rather than the older a/name.

However, sometimes this plain hyper-reference system isn't quite good enough. Sometimes you want internal links (links to documents you control) to behave differently to external links. Sometimes you want to indicate that the link is to a bibliographic citation, and sometimes you want to quote and link a URL without having to type it twice.

These distinctions become even more important if stylesheets are used to distinguish the kinds of links, or if the document will also be converted to a paper form, where some of the links can be resolved to reference numbers or page numbers, and some can't.

The hyperref module (which is loaded by default for all GLOSS htmland xhtml processing) achieves all these.

A few words are needed about copy. Usually the URI is of the form #ID linking to an element with the id ID in the current document. Then all child nodes of this element are copied to the position of the copy element. This means you don't have to type complicated phrases more than once, and (more importantly) if you make a change to the phrase then you only have make the change once.

More information on the hyperref module is at mv/html/hyperref.html. A demonstration document where copy is used to crossreference theorem numbers is at copydemo.xhtml.