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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-22T19:22:39+00:00

Not 100% sure if this is the right SE site to ask this, so

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Not 100% sure if this is the right SE site to ask this, so feel free to move/warn me.

If I have a site http://www.mysite.com with a form on it and define its action as “http://www.mysite.com/handlepost” instead of “/handlepost”, does it still get parsed as a local address by apache? That is, will apache figure out that I’m trying to send my form data to the same server the form resides on and do an automatic local post, or will the data be forced to make a round trip, going online, looking up the domain and actually being sent as an outside request?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Apache does not look at this information. It’s your browser which does this job.

    On the Apache side the job is only outputing content (html in this case), apache does not care about the way you write your url in this content.

    On the browser side the page is analysed and GET requests (images,etc) are sent automatically to all collected url. The browser SHOULD know that relative url /foo are in fact http://currentsite/foo – or it’s a really dump browser -. It is his job. And then it’s his job to push the request to the right server (and to known if he should make a new DNS request, build a new HTTP connection, reuse an existing opened connection, build several connections — usually max 3 conn per DNS–, etc). Apache does nothing in this part of the job.

    So why absolute url are bad? Not because of the job the browser should have to do handling it (which is in fact nothing, his job is transforming relative url to absolute ones); It’s because if your web application use only relative url the admin of the web server will have far more possibilities on proxying your application. For example:

    • he will be able to server your web application on several different DNS domains
      (and then make the browser think he’s talking to several servers, parallelizing static files downloads)
    • he could as use use this multi-domain to set up the application for different costumers
    • he could build an HTTPS access for external network access and an HTTP (without the S) access on a local name for the local network

    And if your application is building the absolute url these tasks will become really harder.

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