htmllocation-href

Having links relative to root?

Is there a way to have all links on a page be relative to the root directory?

For example, on www.example.com/fruits/apples/apple.html I could have a link saying:

<a href="fruits/index.html">Back to Fruits List</a>

Would this link be pointing to www.example.com/fruits/apples/fruits/index.html or www.example.com/fruits/index.html? If the first, is there a way to have it point to the 2nd instead?

Solution

  • A root-relative URL starts with a / character, to look something like <a href="/directoryInRoot/fileName.html">link text</a>.

    The link you posted: <a href="fruits/index.html">Back to Fruits List</a> is linking to an html file located in a directory named fruits, the directory being in the same directory as the html page in which this link appears.

    To make it a root-relative URL, change it to:

    <a href="/fruits/index.html">Back to Fruits List</a>

    Edited in response to question, in comments, from OP:

    So doing / will make it relative to www.example.com, is there a way to specify what the root is, e.g what if i want the root to be www.example.com/fruits in www.example.com/fruits/apples/apple.html?

    Yes, prefacing the URL, in the href or src attributes, with a / will make the path relative to the root directory. For example, given the html page at www.example.com/fruits/apples.html, the a of href="/vegetables/carrots.html" will link to the page www.example.com/vegetables/carrots.html.

    The base tag element allows you to specify the base-uri for that page (though the base tag would have to be added to every page in which it was necessary for to use a specific base, for this I'll simply cite the W3's example:

    For example, given the following BASE declaration and A declaration:

    <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
   "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<HTML>
 <HEAD>
   <TITLE>Our Products</TITLE>
   <BASE href="http://www.aviary.com/products/intro.html">
 </HEAD>

 <BODY>
   <P>Have you seen our <A href="../cages/birds.gif">Bird Cages</A>?
 </BODY>
</HTML>

    the relative URI "../cages/birds.gif" would resolve to:

    http://www.aviary.com/cages/birds.gif

    Example quoted from: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/links.html#h-12.4.

    Suggested reading: