CSS Forum

**Thort** · 04-19-2006, 04:57 PM

Hi !

I want to use one external stylesheet file to control all my documents. Now I want to call upon this stylesheet from all my documents residing in different directories.

If the stylesheet is located in a directory lower than the document the code will be like this:

<link rel=stylesheet href="directoryname/stylesheet.css" type="text/css">

That's handy.

But, my question is: If the stylesheet is located one step higher in the directory-hierarchy, is there a simple way to point to the stylesheet in the document?

Or, do I have to write the whole long path from C:/ an so on?

**Cypher_489** · 04-19-2006, 05:12 PM

nope, just use ../

e.g.

root/about_us/about.htm - HTML file

root/style.css - CSS file

The HTML would be <link rel=stylesheet href="../style.css" type="text/css">

Hope this helps

**Thort** · 04-19-2006, 05:18 PM

Thanks Cypher_489 !

It works!

**Cypher_489** · 04-19-2006, 05:29 PM

No problem! For future reference, if its two levels higher then it would be ../../style.css (Same pattern for 3, 4 levels etc...)

**vangogh** · 04-19-2006, 06:11 PM

You might also be able to just use /style.css depending on where the stylesheet is located. Starting with the / is the same as saying root so you don't always need to use the ../ to back up a directory.

For example if your stylesheet is located in root/css/style.css then a path of /css/style.css should work from any of your pages.

Using the ../ works fine, but I know it's sometimes easy to make a mistake with it. It is for me anyway.

**chrishirst** · 04-19-2006, 06:13 PM

or forget about the ../ notation totally and simply reference everything from the root folder

href="/directoryname/stylesheet.css"

that way it will be correct from any folder in the site without having to be concerned whether it is one above or two above.

**Thort** · 04-20-2006, 04:46 AM

Thanks vangogh and chrishirst for the additional information!

**ADAM Web Design** · 04-26-2006, 02:41 PM

Just to make life more confusing...

What I find works the best is to put the absolute path to the CSS file in the href property. e.g. http://www.domain.com/CSS/mycss.css . That way, no matter where you put a file that accesses it, the file going to access it from the same place.

I haven't tried this with any localhost-type stuff, since the machine that's going to be my production server won't be ready for 2-3 weeks (money and all that). But it does work the way I just explained it.