About absolute link paths

Site pages contain paths to a variety of linked files: other pages in the site, images displayed on the page, media items embedded in the page, and so on. GoLive automatically uses relative paths for the destinations of links. In most cases, relative paths are appropriate to use. But, if necessary for special cases, you can selectively change the paths to make them absolute, or set a preference to have GoLive make all new paths you create absolute by default. When you make a path absolute, the entire path from the root folder to the linked file is provided. Otherwise only a relative path is provided.

Example

A page /root/pages/info/page.html (where root is the name of the root folder) contains the image /root/images/image.gif. The absolute path to the image file is /images/image.gif. The relative path is ../../images/image.gif.

Absolute paths are useful in the following cases:

• If a form references a CGI script at the root level of the site directory (or any other subdirectory), any references to that file are usually written as absolute.
• If a common navigation bar is used on many pages that reside in folders at various hierarchical levels, you can use an absolute path specification throughout to reference its image files, allowing you to copy and paste the same code snippet onto all the pages.

However, absolute paths work only at sites where there is a Web server providing information about the location of the site's root folder. For the same reason, using absolute paths prevents you from previewing pages in a Web browser on your local computer--that is, a previewing browser has no way of locating this root folder.

Note: An absolute path in GoLive is not a full path from the file system root or a fully qualified URL.