I'm developing a website which will live on https://www.example.com/. While developing, and later as a test site, it's at http://127.0.0.1/temp-dir-for-my-project/.
This means that I currently have a bunch of hrefs in the HTML, as well as CSS files, starting with /temp-dir-for-my-project/, which obviously break once I'm done and upload it to the live site. Over there, it should be / instead.
Sadly, the BASE element, which I thought would solve this, only applies to relative paths. For example, ./meow.html with /temp-dir-for-my-project/ as the BASE would refer to /temp-dir-for-my-project/meow.html, but /meow.html in the same situation would be... /meow.html, because it's an "absolute" path.
Before you say "just use relative paths, then!", well... If I do that, I have to keep track of in which "dir" I am. For example, for the webpage at https://www.example.com/test.html, I could do: ./other.html and it would work both on the live site and in my test site (assuming the BASE is set). But the webpage at https://www.example.com/subdir/test.html would have to link to './../other.html' or else it wouldn't link to the correct page.
This gets messy. I wish I could use "absolute" paths and still have the BASE be the... base. Is there a way, or am I forced to use ./../../blabla... for any page located in subdirs (whether those be real subdirs or just how the URL is rewritten to look)?
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I am developing a website on a web server which can be accessed by 2 URL: mywebsite.example.com or example.com/mywebsite. For example, when I access mywebsite.example.com/images/abc.jpg and example.com/mywebsite/images/abc.jpg, I get the same picture.
The problem is, I have many links inside my website, and I am not sure should I use an absolute or relative path.
From another question
Absolute vs relative URLs
I found someone suggesting using URL relative to root (like /images/abc.jpg), however when I access the website using example.com/mywebsite, every link just break.
For relative paths, I found it hard to manage since webpages are in different folders, but using the same template which contains some links. It means I have to manually set some links as ../ and some as ./.
I have also tried using <base> tag however it messes up with anchor. Even if I try to include the full path before the # symbol, some jQuery libraries does not function properly since they get the value inside the attribute href directly, but not extracting the part after #.
Would there be any better practice or suggestion?
I think you should use relative urls, and concentrate your searchs on how to use relative urls in templates, that would be resolved relatively to the final page.
I don't know the technology you are using for templating, but I see two common solutions :
declare a "relative path" variable in the template, and then override it in the different pages, with the new relative path. Use this relative path as a prefix for all urls
delegate urls construction to a service that would know the final page. Somethinkg like resolveUrl(..)
For my webpage http://www.example.com/homepage.html which is the best way to link static resources, such as CSS files?
http://www.example.com/css/base.css
http://example.com/css/base.css
/css/base.css
Neither is better.
One will survive moving the linking document to a different location. The other will survive moving the entire tree to a different location.
In most cases, the latter is more useful (as it lets the links work between environments (development, staging, test, production)) but your needs may vary.
Relative path is best way to use.
Ex : http://www.example.com - Absolute path
Relative path
var style="css/base.css";
var style1="css/base1.css";
Then, Absolute path+style;
or absolute path+style1 . We can able to change relative path without hard coding.
For internally-served resources, typically you would use a relative URL, for the reasons stated by Quentin (upvoted accordingly).
However, absolute URL's are useful in some important scenarios that you should be aware of, for example:
When you use a CDN (content delivery network) to serve your static files (such as the CSS files you mention in your question) more quickly. These are served from other servers than yours, so you have to fully specify the location.
When you need to change the protocol. The most common case is switching to https, e.g., for actions like signins and purchases.
If you are putting links into an email, where of course relative paths won't go anywhere. This isn't relevant for loading a CSS file, since styles are inlined in HTML emails, but still it's a case to consider, e.g., for images.
If my path is "http://www.example.com/folder1/folder2/" how can I return to "http://www.example.com/folder1/"
I've tried
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Which get me back to "http://www.example.com/" and not the previous folder. Any clue on how to do it ?
EDIT
I have a
<base href="http://www.example.com/" />
in the head, could it be because it try to go down 1 folder from that base ?
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Should work if you drop the trailing slash. Don't really know why it wouldn't work with it but if it's not working, try that...
EDIT Just tested and both versions worked for me in IE8 - what browser are you using to test it?
Another Edit
If you use a <base> tag, all relative hrefs will be relative the href attribute specified as the <base> (thats the point of it). If your base is the root of the site, like http://www.example.com/, links that try to step down a directory won't make any sense, since there's nowhere lower to go, and they will just point to the root directory. However, if the base is the root of the site, there's probably no point in having one at all, since this is, effectively, the default - it would only make a difference if you were working from a higher level directory.
If the base is not the root, but somewhere higher (like http://www.example.com/somedirectory/) there is a point in the base declaration, but you have to make a decision - something would have to be specified absolutely. So if you have done it because you want to refer to all your images as just file.jpg instead of /somedirectory/file.jpg, you either need to change your image references to the absolute /somedirectory/file.jpg, or have your 'navigation links' like the one shown in the question specified absolutely. You can't do both.
I would say (although I don't know much about the rest of your site and how it was built) that your best bet is to scrap the <base> in order to allow for relative navigation links, but the choice is yours...
I have a site with static HTML pages in the home directory. These HTML pages use relative paths to refer to images, css, and links i.e.
<img src="images/myimg.gif">
and
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I also have a monolithic script whose URL is, i.e. http://mysite.com/myScript which uses "extra path info" to select functions... i.e. http://mysite.com/myScript/products shows a list of products. So in HTML generated from the script I need to refer to images, css and links like this:
<img src="../images/myimg.gif">
and
Contact Us
The problem is now I want to start moving common HTML into include files, (e.g. common header and footer), but the fact that the script and the static HTML refer to relative resources in different ways is complicating matters.
I don't want to use absolute paths because that messes up my colleague's work when she tries to work on the pages in DramWeaver, and it also makes the site less flexible.
What's the best way to solve this issue? One idea I had was to use URL rewriting in Apache to allow the URL to http://mysite.com/products to really use http://mysite.com/myScript/products but I don't have experience with URL rewriting so I don't know how easy that would be. Another idea I had was to use the META BASE attribute in HTML but I don't like the fact that I would have to hard-code that into every HTML page, and it would have to have the full URL hard-coded (e.g. http://mysite.com/) into each one. Any advice?
Can't you refer to your images with a slash at the beginning so all files linked to are from the root, no matter how deep you are in the directory structure you are? E.g:
<img src="/images/myimg.gif" />
EDIT:
You could use $_SERVER to get the path then use substr_count to count the number of slashes in the path. Add as many ../'s as you need based on that number. Would that work for you?
I got a question and although I could find related information, I'm if it was exactly about what I'm wondering about.
The thing is, I got a site on http://localhost/site.
Now, when I create a link, let's say, <a href="/posts">, it links to http://localhost/posts instead of http://localhost/site/posts.
It works fine if I remove the slash (<a href="posts">), that would be the closest and maybe the easiest solution, but I'd like to know why the links ignore the folder where the file is at?
And I also would like to know if this can be fixed with .htaccess or something.
I've read that a link that begins with / makes it "absolute". So a link beginning with / is only intended to be used to link directly to the root, or to be used by sites stored at the root (in this case it wouldn't make much sense?) ?
The leading '/' at the start of the URL informs the web browser that the path given is absolute (with respect to the web server root), i.e. if you link to /posts then you know that the resulting link will be to http://www.mysite.com/posts.
If you don't supply the leading '/' (and you don't give a complete url like http://www.mysite.com/posts) then usually the url is relative, and any page given will be relatvie to the page currently being viewed.
For example:
page being viewed link url target page
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
www.mysite.com/site link.html www.mysite.com/site/link.html
www.mysite.com/site ../link.html www.mysite.com/link.html
www.mysite.com/some/other/page link.html www.mysite.com/some/other/page/link.html
www.mysite.com/some/other/page ../../../link.html www.mysite.com/link.html
The decision on whether to use absolute or relative links is entirely up to you - the advantage of relative links is that if your site moves, links between pages on your site will still work correctly (for example if your site moves to www.mysite.com/otherpath, then any absolute links such www.mysite.com/originalpath/home will no longer work.
You should see the following site for a more complete explanation of relative urls:
Relative URLs (WebReference.com)
Your site root is localhost although you assume that site is your site root. When you use / it is relative to localhost as it is an absolute link.
Try doing it < a href="../posts" >
./ Means base directory, or home
../ Means one directory up