The Little Mac Book, Tiger Edition [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

What are links?

Every web page has links on it. Single-click a link with your mouse and a new web page appears. A link might be text or it might be a graphic. If it's text, it almost always has an underline; if it's a graphic, it sometimes has a border around it. Even if the visual clues of the underline or the border are missing, you can always tell when something is a link because the pointer turns into a hand with a pointing finger, as shown to the right. Just run your mouse over the page (without pressing the button down) and you'll see the pointer turn into the browser hand whenever you "mouse over" a link.

This is a typical "browser hand" that you'll see in a browser.

This is a typical web page. You can see the browser hand positioned over underlined text, about to click the link to go to the Luddite Lounge.

You also see a row of buttons across the top that look like you should probably click on them.

When you click on a link like the one circled above, "Luddite Lounge," the browser jumps to another page, in this case the page shown to the right. You can see there are more links on this new page. You can click links for the rest of your life and still not have time to read everything.

That's the World Wide Web.

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Exercise 1:
Poke around some web pages.

Go back and forth from page to page

You see buttons in your toolbar. The ones you will use most often are "Back" and "Forward." The Back button, of course, takes you back through pages you have visited. Once you've gone back, then the Forward button appears so you can go forward again.

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You can also use the History menu to go directly to pages you have visited.

Open a new browser window

You can have lots and lots of browser windows open. This comes in handy when you really like a page, or maybe this page has lots of links you want to follow and when you go to another page you don't want this one to disappear. So instead of clicking on the link to get another page, Control-click on it (hold the Control key down and click once). You will get a menu right there in the middle of the page, and one of the options is "Open Link in New Window." Choose that optiona new window with the new page will open in front of the previous window.

The Back button on the new page will be gray because, since this is a new window, it has no where to go back to! Your original page still retains all of the Back pages.

Hold down the Control key and click on a link to get a menu like this. If you have a two-button mouse, ignore the Control key and use the right button.

Exercise 2:
Try these other two tips for opening windows.

Check the Dock

When multiple web pages are open, they will all be displayed in the Dock pop-up menu. Just press (don't click) on the Safari icon in the Dock, as shown below, and choose the page you want to come forward.

Press on the Safari icon in the Dock.