Home/ Questions/Q 7952363
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-06-04T02:50:24+00:00

I started learning html recently, and one thing that really confused me is why

  • 0

I started learning html recently, and one thing that really confused me is why do some links have a forward-slash(“/”) before the path and some links don’t?

ie.

<link href="/favicon.png" rel="icon">
<link href="/stylesheets/screen.css" media="screen, projection" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">

vs.

<dt><a href="reset/index.html">Reset CSS</a></dt>

Is one a relative path and one an absolute path? and how do href’s work exactly? does it just stick on the path name after the base url?

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Is one a relative path and one an absolute path?

    Yes.

    If your browser is currently pointing at http://foo/bar/baz.html then:

    • <a href="reset/index.html"> would link to http://foo/bar/reset/index.html.
    • <a href="/reset/index.html"> would link to http://foo/reset/index.html.

    If there is a base element in the head of your HTML document then the relative path will be relative to the base. For example the link here will take you to http://example.com/foobar/reset/index.html regardless of where the page is located.

    <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<HTML>
 <HEAD>
   <TITLE>Base element example</TITLE>
   <BASE href="http://example.com/foobar/">
 </HEAD>

 <BODY>
   <P><a href="reset/index.html">Reset CSS</a>
 </BODY>
</HTML>
    • 0