BioSophia

is a non-profit corporation whose scope is
to create, collect, organize and distribute
digital documents of biological literature

This page explains how you can make working hyperlinks in your documents.

Before reading this one, you may wish to have read before organization and tips pages.

Hyperlinking a document means that you may reference other documents that you don't have embedded in your one; this saves a lot of space and time... just provided that the hyperlink actually works !

There are two main categories of hyperlinks. The first comprises:

EXTERNAL hyperlinks
This kind of links points to resources that are, to be short, beyond your control.
We mean that if in a document of yours you point today to a resource located in "http://www.somewhere.com/resources/linked_document.html", it's by no way guaranteed that tomorrow that resource still works, contains that special document, or exists at all.
Also, that resource may contain and distribute material contrary to our ethics and copyright rules.
Because of these reasons, we highly discourage external hyperlinking in BioSophia files, especially if not pointing to public organizations (i.e. ".gov", ".edu" etc.), and reserve to ourselves the right to refuse contributed documents not following this rule.

LOCAL hyperlinks
This kind of links is under your control: you points to resources that are, usually, on your own computer. You may write a paper referencing three BioSophia documents without being obliged to embed them in it.
The problem with local hyperlinks is that they work well on your own computer, where files are organized as *you* organized them. So that, you may write something hyperlinking a "jones.html" paper, and this link won't work at all - on other computers where "jones.html" does exist - just because *it's in another place*.

Organizing BioSophia files as suggested in the two linked pages proposed at the top of this one may ensure different users to have the same file structure, so that local hyperlinks works.

Given that you organized BioSophia files as suggested, local hyperlinks must be written (in the so-called "relative" fashion) as in the following examples to work properly for other users too:

supposed your surname to be "BLACK", and that consequently your work on molluscs, 00001234.htm, is presumed to be stored on users' computers as
   "path:\biosophia\mollusca\BLACK\00001234.htm",

(1)
a reference to another paper by yourself, suppose 00005678.htm (and so stored in:
   "path:\biosophia\mollusca\BLACK\00005678.htm")
*must* be written:

...please read also <a href="00005678.htm">my other paper</a> for info...

(2)
a reference to another work on Mollusca by "WHITE", suppose 00005678.htm (and so stored in:
   "path:\biosophia\mollusca\WHITE\00005678.htm")
*must* be written:

...please read also the <a href="../WHITE/00005678.htm">paper of White</a> for info...

(3)
a reference to another work on Mollusca by "GRAY & WHITE", suppose 00005678.htm (and so stored in:
   "path:\biosophia\mollusca\GRAY\00005678.htm")
*must* be written:

...please read also the <a href="../GRAY/00005678.htm">paper of Gray & White</a> for info...

(4)
a reference to a picture of the Mollusk "nigra Mitra", suppose 00005678.htm (and so stored in:
   "path:\biosophia\mollusca_pics\N\00005678.jpg")
*must* be written:

...please see also the picture of <a href="../mollusca_pics/N/00005678.jpg">Mitra nigra</a> for comparison...

(5)
a reference to another work on Brachiopoda by "Green", suppose 00005678.htm (and so stored in:
   "path:\biosophia\brachiopoda\GREEN\00005678.htm")
*must* be written:

...please read also the <a href="../brachiopoda/GREEN/00005678.htm">paper of Green</a> for info...

All this, as often happens, is longer to explain than to do...

This kind of relative links will keep on working even if a user does have *not* a directory "c:\biosophia", but rather a "c:\download\web\biosophia" or "d:\biosophia" or "e:\files\biosophia" ad so on.
The important matter is that the structure that we suggested is respected *after* the "\biosophia" branch.
Such links will work also when the whole tree is exported "as is" on a Web server.

RETURN