How do article links work that are imbedded in KA article text?

1. The first link is an example generated by the application. It was created with the article link icon in the rich text field editor.  These proprietary tags are only shown when editing the article.
   
   <span data-contents="Link to LB1" data-docid="LB1" data-linktype="2" title="jump to LB1">Link to LB1</span><br />
   
   The Authoring preview does not transform this custom scheme into a standard link; the link will not open in the Authoring article preview tab. They are designed to just be used when opening the article from search results or the browse function. Those pages will transform it into <a> tag. This is the expected behavior.


2. The second one is a fully-qualified URL. The danger here is if your URL changes.
   
   <a href="https://mysite.custhelp.com/app/answers/answer_view/a_id/1000015" target="”_blank”">my description of link</a><br />
   
   This one will work from Authoring, since it contains the whole URL in the href property. This is also expected. This can be used if you want to open the link in new tab in authoring.  It will not do the same from the BUI and Customer Portal search results.


3. The third example will only work from browse or BUI and CP search results because it is a relative URL.
   
   <a href="/app/answers/answer_view/a_id/1000015" target="”_blank”">my description of relative link2</a>
   
   Since the URL in the href property is a relative path, when you try to open it in Authoring it will be appended to the hostname of the Authoring application rather than Customer Portal. If the user wants to use this, they have to provide the whole URL as in the second option. Note that this will open the linked article as it appears in Customer Portal, not as an Authoring preview.