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- What does “href” stand for in HTML? 4 answers
After writing html for couple of years I realized that I don't really know why the href attribute is named "href" .
The HTML Recomendation does not shed light on the subject by saying :
This attribute specifies the location of a Web resource, thus defining a link between the current element (the source anchor) and the destination anchor defined by this attribute.
Also the HTML 4.01 DTD does not provide a lot of clue .
href %URI; #IMPLIED -- URI for linked resource --
I could make an educated guess for the meaning , but i was hoping for something canonical .
It stands for Hypertext Reference
From the source written by Tim Berners-Lee himself.:
"Help" is all that is displayed, with some indication that it is an option. If the user choses (clicks a mouse on, choses by number depending on which client he has) then the client asks the server for /HEPDATA/HELP. ("A" is for "anchor", "HREF" is for "hypertext reference")
Hypertext REFerence. You can see the link here for more about it -
Hypertext Reference, From a day where links used to be called "hyperlinks" hypertext is simply link to another big of information, and hypertext reference is the link itself:
Its stand for Hypertext Reference .
The href attribute specifies the URL of the page the link goes to.
If the href attribute is not present, the tag is not a hyperlink.
href stands for Hypertext REFerence. It is the attribute of the html which gives the URL of the page the link goes to ....
Further information can be obtained from
http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/draft-ietf-iiir-html-01.txt - By Tim Berners Lee
http://www.w3schools.com/tags/att_a_href.asp
http://tomayko.com/writings/wtf-is-an-href-anyway
来源：https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20172280/what-does-href-stand-for