Does anyone know why the relative path such as /administrative/stupid.htm is not the preferred way of doing things rather than the hard to remember, decipher, etc. method of ../../../adminstrative/stupid.htm.

Will one get in trouble with method number one as I surely find it easier to do and it works. Unfortunately, it seems like all books recommend the other method.

Thanks!

HI judyb,

actually both examples that you give are both relative paths.

the later is when you have to work your way down the directory path.

For instance here are examples of what might be the absolute path to each example that you gave to show you the correlation.

here is what the relative paths represent..


The page with the link using a relative path

www.site.com/level1/level2/level3/page.htm

to get to this page

www.site.com/level1/level2/level3/level4/lpage.htm

using relative path would be

level4/lpage.htm

------------------------------------

to get to this page

www.site.com/level1/page.htm

using relative path would be

../../page.htm (this takes you back the two levels needed to find the page)

I hope this is what you were asking!?

I personally like absolute paths. Both have their pros and cons.

Thanks, but I knew they were both relative paths. All my references say to use the ../../ type of path. I find the other kind easier and wondered why the ../../../ is preferred, and whether there will be any dire consequences in using it.

Why do you prefer absolute paths? It seems to me that somewhere I read they were slower.

I prefer relative paths because by using that it doesn't really matter where you're files are located, the files can always find each other. Instead of using an absolute path, were things to change you'd need to do a lot of fixing paths. There are probably a few handy tools out there for that kinda purpose but why go trough the trouble anyway ...