A hot link is a word, phrase or image which is highlighted by your browser (<- like this) indicating to the reader that more information on the highlighted item is available by clicking on that item. When you select or click on a hotlink, you are automatically transferred to the document (or image, etc.) which that hotlink points to (or if the selected resource is not something your browser knows inherently how to display, like a video for instance, an external viewer is launched which knows how to display the selected resource).

If the browser can't determine the type of the resource (by it's file extension, e.g. Graphics Interchange Format files end with a .gif extension), you will be prompted to download it. You also have the option of downloading documents to your local disk even the browser does know how to display the image, for instance if you want to save the resource (browsers that support this usually have a menu option called "load documents to disk" or "load images to disk", so that each time you browse a resource, not only is the resource displayed to you, but you are prompted with a file save dialogue to save it to your disk).

Hotlinks are created by placing a word, phrase, or image within a pair of anchors which associate the text with a URL (location of another document). Image hotlinks are called clickable images. A complex image can even contain multiple hotlinks (depending upon where on the image the user clicks), using image maps.

The highlighted words and phrases on this page are all hotlinks.