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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-20T10:34:51+00:00

I got a question and although I could find related information, I’m if it

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I got a question and although I could find related information, I’m if it was exactly about what I’m wondering about.

The thing is, I got a site on http://localhost/site.
Now, when I create a link, let’s say, <a href="/posts">, it links to http://localhost/posts instead of http://localhost/site/posts.
It works fine if I remove the slash (<a href="posts">), that would be the closest and maybe the easiest solution, but I’d like to know why the links ignore the folder where the file is at?

And I also would like to know if this can be fixed with .htaccess or something.

I’ve read that a link that begins with / makes it “absolute”. So a link beginning with / is only intended to be used to link directly to the root, or to be used by sites stored at the root (in this case it wouldn’t make much sense?) ?

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  1. Editorial Team

    The leading ‘/’ at the start of the URL informs the web browser that the path given is absolute (with respect to the web server root), i.e. if you link to /posts then you know that the resulting link will be to http://www.mysite.com/posts.

    If you don’t supply the leading ‘/’ (and you don’t give a complete url like http://www.mysite.com/posts) then usually the url is relative, and any page given will be relatvie to the page currently being viewed.

    For example:

    page being viewed               link url             target page
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
www.mysite.com/site              link.html            www.mysite.com/site/link.html
www.mysite.com/site              ../link.html         www.mysite.com/link.html
www.mysite.com/some/other/page   link.html            www.mysite.com/some/other/page/link.html
www.mysite.com/some/other/page   ../../../link.html   www.mysite.com/link.html

    The decision on whether to use absolute or relative links is entirely up to you – the advantage of relative links is that if your site moves, links between pages on your site will still work correctly (for example if your site moves to www.mysite.com/otherpath, then any absolute links such www.mysite.com/originalpath/home will no longer work.

    You should see the following site for a more complete explanation of relative urls:

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