An inline link displays remote content without the need for embedding the content. The remote content may be accessed with or without the user following the link.

An inline link may display a modified version of the content; for instance, instead of an image, a thumbnail, low resolution preview, cropped section, or magnified section may be shown. The full content is then usually available on demand, as is the case with print publishing software – e.g., with an external link. This allows for smaller file sizes and quicker response to changes when the full linked content is not needed, as is the case when rearranging a page layout.
An anchor hyperlink (anchor link) is a link bound to a portion of a document, which is often called a fragment. The fragment is generally a portion of text or a heading, though not necessarily. For instance, it may also be a hot area in an image (image map in HTML), a designated, often irregular part of an image.

Fragments are marked with anchors (in any of various ways), which is why a link to a fragment is called an anchor link (that is, a link to an anchor). For example, in XML, the element <anchor id="name" />" provides anchoring capability (as long as the DTD or schema defines it), and in wiki markup, {{anchor|name}} is a typical example of implementing it. In word processor apps, anchors can be inserted where desired and may be called bookmarks. In URLs, the hash character (#) precedes the name of the anchor for the fragment.

One way to define a hot area in an image is by a list of coordinates that indicate its boundaries. For example, a political map of Africa may have each country hyperlinked to further information about that country. A separate invisible hot area interface allows for swapping skins or labels within the linked hot areas without repetitive embedding of links in the various skin elements.

Text hyperlink. Hyperlink is embedded into a word or a phrase and makes this text clickable.

Image hyperlink. Hyperlink is embedded into an image and makes this image clickable.

Bookmark hyperlink. Hyperlink is embedded into a text or an image and takes visitors to another part of a web page.

E-mail hyperlink. Hyperlink is embedded into e-mail address and allows visitors to send an e-mail message to this e-mail address.
A fat link (also known as a "one-to-many" link, an "extended link" or a "multi-tailed link") is a hyperlink which leads to multiple endpoints; the link is a set-valued function.

Tim Berners-Lee saw the possibility of using hyperlinks to link any information to any other information over the Internet. Hyperlinks were therefore integral to the creation of the World Wide Web. Web pages are written in the hypertext mark-up language HTML.

This is what a hyperlink to the home page of the W3C organization could look like in HTML code:

This HTML code consists of several tags:
• The hyperlink starts with an anchor opening tag <a, and includes a hyperlink reference href="https://www.w3.org/" to the URL for the page. (The URL is enclosed in quotes.)
• The URL is followed by >, marking the end of the anchor opening tag.
• The words that follow identify what is being linked; this is the only part of the code that is ordinarily visible on the screen when the page is rendered, but when the cursor hovers over the link, many browsers display the target URL somewhere on the screen, such as in the lower left-hand corner.
• Typically these words are underlined and colored (for example, blue for a link that has not yet been visited and purple for a link already visited).
• The anchor closing tag (</a>) terminates the hyperlink code.
• The <a> tag can also consist of various attributes such as the "rel" attribute which specifies the relationship between the current document and linked document.
Webgraph is a graph, formed from web pages as vertices and hyperlinks, as directed edges.
The W3C recommendation called XLink describes hyperlinks that offer a far greater degree of functionality than those offered in HTML. These extended links can be multidirectional, remove linking from, within, and between XML documents. It can also describe simple links, which are unidirectional and therefore offer no more functionality than hyperlinks in HTML.
Permalinks are URLs that are intended to remain unchanged for many years into the future, yielding hyperlinks that are less susceptible to link rot. Permalinks are often rendered simply, that is, as friendly URLs, so as to be easy for people to type and remember. Permalinks are used in order to point and redirect readers to the same Web page, blog post or any online digital media.

The scientific literature is a place where link persistence is crucial to the public knowledge. A 2013 study in BMC Bioinformatics analyzed 15,000 links in abstracts from Thomson Reuters' Web of Science citation index, founding that the median lifespan of Web pages was 9.3 years, and just 62% were archived. The median lifespan of a Web page constitutes high-degree variable, but its order of magnitude usually is of some months.

A link from one domain to another is said to be outbound from its source anchor and inbound to its target.

The most common destination anchor is a URL used in the World Wide Web. This can refer to a document, e.g. a webpage, or other resource, or to a position in a webpage. The latter is achieved by means of an HTML element with a "name" or "id" attribute at that position of the HTML document. The URL of the position is the URL of the webpage with a fragment identifier – "#id attribute" – appended.

When linking to PDF documents from an HTML page the "id attribute" can be replaced with syntax that references a page number or another element of the PDF, for example, "#page=386".
A web browser usually displays a hyperlink in some distinguishing way, e.g. in a different color, font or style, or with certain symbols following to visualize link target or document types. This is also called link decoration. The behavior and style of links can be specified using the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) language.

In a graphical user interface, the appearance of a mouse cursor may change into a hand motif to indicate a link. In most graphical web browsers, links are displayed in underlined blue text when they have not been visited, but underlined purple text when they have. When the user activates the link (e.g., by clicking on it with the mouse) the browser displays the link's target. If the target is not an HTML file, depending on the file type and on the browser and its plugins, another program may be activated to open the file.

The HTML code contains some or all of the five main characteristics of a link:
• link destination ("href" pointing to a URL)
• link label
• link title
• link target
• link class or link id
It uses the HTML element "a" with the attribute "href" (HREF is an abbreviation for "Hypertext REFerence" ) and optionally also the attributes "title", "target", and "class" or "id":

<a href="URL" title="link title" target="link target" class="link class">link label</a>

To embed a link into a web page, blogpost, or comment, it may take this form:

<a href="https://example.com/">Example</a>

In a typical web browser, this would display as the underlined word "Example" in blue, which when clicked would take the user to the example.com website. This contributes to a clean, easy to read text or document.

By default, browsers will usually display hyperlinks as such:
• An unvisited link is usually blue and underlined

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