HTML link with href that refers to text?

Question

This is a simple yes or no question (probably no), googling didn't seem to give me a straight answer. Say you have a link that is

<a href="www.stackoverflow.com">www.stackoverflow.com</a>

Is it possible to make something like

<a href=self.text>www.stackoverflow.com</a>

without using anything else (obviously, no scripts)? Is there any kind of shortcut?

Crossland

Nope, no way to do that. – Shagreen

That's only possible with JavaScript, I'd imagine. Though, with CSS you could sort of do it the other way round, take the href attribute and make that the link text. (Though it wouldn't generate a clickable text, I think.) – Typhon

@DavidThomas - A quick test shows that it generates clickable text in IE, Firefox, Opera and Safari, but not Chrome. – Yelmene

Answer 1

No, you need to have both the href attribute and a value between the a tags. Without using any scripts, it's not possible to refer to its own contents.

Hughes

Answer 2

create an script/function for that

put a class to all of your anchors (i.e. "anchorTextAsHref" ), get all of them and modify the DOM structure,

just placing the text equals to whatever href has.

    let anchors=document.getElementsByClassName("anchorTextAsHref");
    for (let i = 0; i < anchors.length; i++) {
        anchors[i].text = anchors[i].href;
    }

Moulmein

Answer 3

You can do it the other way around.

Use the CSS pseudo class a::before and set its content to attr(href).

a {
font-family: sans-serif;
font-size: 20px;
}

a::before {
  display: block;
  content: attr(href);
}

<a href="http://stackoverflow.com"/>

Suffer

Answer 4

Use anchor link Useful Tips Section Create a link to the "Useful Tips Section" inside the same document:

Visit the Useful Tips Section

Pocketful

Answer 5

I think you're looking for the Anchor Tag . You can use the syntax to link to it, if you reference it by using a <a href="link"> somewhere in the body.

Look here at the bottom for some examples:

http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_links.asp

Double

Nope, not looking for an anchor. Just looking for a way to get the href to equal the text. Thanks, though. – Crossland

I was simply wondering if it was possible (without Javascript) to have a link's URL lifted from its text. The answer is no. – Crossland