[Hyperlinks] Relative or Full Paths?

Conrad11 · 1 Oct 2006 at 14:27

Hi there,

When people are doing hyperlinks do they use relative or full paths?

Any advantage of either?

Thanks.

Van Hellseek · 1 Oct 2006 at 14:52

Conrad11 said:
Hi there,

When people are doing hyperlinks do they use relative or full paths?

Any advantage of either?

Thanks.

advantage of full links is google might pick them up as references. happened to my old site and resulted in a higher google rating!

but i generally use relative on my newest site.

Craig321 · 1 Oct 2006 at 15:57

Advantage of relative paths is you can move the script around without worrying about links.

Conrad11 · 1 Oct 2006 at 16:23

Craig321 said:
Advantage of relative paths is you can move the script around without worrying about links.

Surely that is irrelivant, cause you would have to change the links anyways if you move it?

Al Vallario · 1 Oct 2006 at 16:35

Conrad11 said:
Surely that is irrelivant, cause you would have to change the links anyways if you move it?

No. A lot of people tend to (whether this is good practice or not, I have no idea) set a global variable as the document root (e.g. www.websitename.com/applicationname/) then use relative URLs within the application itself. That way all one has to do when moving the application around is redefine the global document root variable.

I tend to use relative URLs, then play around with CSS2 (I think it is) to display absolute URLs in print-outs

Beansprout · 1 Oct 2006 at 16:40

Al Vallario said:
No. A lot of people tend to (whether this is good practice or not, I have no idea) set a global variable as the document root (e.g. www.websitename.com/applicationname/) then use relative URLs within the application itself. That way all one has to do when moving the application around is redefine the global document root variable.

I do a slightly modified version of this

Conrad11 · 1 Oct 2006 at 17:59

I think i see what your referring to.

Do you mean that you can have your application in: Http://www.domain.com/folder , and rename the folder to Http://www.domain.com/newfolder and all the links still work.

Is that what you were referring to?

Thanks.

Craig321 · 3 Oct 2006 at 00:40

Conrad11 said:
Surely that is irrelivant, cause you would have to change the links anyways if you move it?

No, if you code it so you don't need to change the URLs then you won't have to.

e.g.

Code:

$include "includes/hello.php";

When you move the script this will not need to be re-coded, if you used this:

Code:

$include "http://www.blah.com/includes/hello.php";

The above would need to be recoded.
---------------------------------------------------
A better example:

Code:

<a href="index.php">Home</a>

Wouldn't need to be recoded but this would:

Code:

<a href="http://www.site.com/index.php">Home</a>