How do I create a link to a file/folder on a network share or local disk

What is the proper syntax for generating a link to a file/folder on a local disk and on a network share?

There isn't any. Depending on your security settings, you might be able to use an explicit HTML anchor e.g.

<a href="file:\\blah\blah.dat">Blah</a>

-- CrawfordCurrie - 11 Mar 2010

Indeed, all the browsers will handle it differently. You'll get a range of results with IE7/8 being more friendly (depending on your security/trust settings), to Chrome on the other end of link friendliness (virtually no support at all). Safari and Firefox are somewhere in between with some of the 6 or so different link constructs only working if you open the link in a new tab (right click), or copy and past the link into a new window or tab.

See here for Mozilla's take on them:

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Links_to_local_pages_don't_work

-- CraigBowers - 12 Mar 2010

Here is a bit more information about Firefox browsers that describes the overall policy architecture referenced in http://kb.mozillazine.org/Links_to_local_pages_don%27t_work#Firefox_1.5.2C_Mozilla_1.8.2C_and_newer

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/components/ConfigPolicy.html

There´s an firefox add-on called "Local Filesystem LInks" ver. 0.99.25 - works fine for me

-- TomTomato - 27 Jan 2014