Question

When I´m in a secure part of a web-site I´m developing (entering a specific page or folder using https), the relative links to the normal pages are automatically converted to https as well.

Is there a way to tell an <a> tag to always use the http protocol instead of the https protocol (or the other way around)?

I know it´s easy using the complete link (http://www.mysite.com/index.html or https://www.mysite.com/index.html), but I would like it to work with relative links (index.html, ../index.html, etc.).

Answer 1

We use Apache mod_rewrite to control whether a page is served via http or https. Here’s an example snippet from a site’s root directory .htaccess file:

# Redirect most reqests for https to http RewriteRule ^https://www.example.com(.*) http://www.example.com$1 [R=301,NC]  # Allow some URIs to be https if requested RewriteCond   %{SERVER_PORT}  ^443$ RewriteCond   %{REQUEST_URI}  !^/images/(.*)$ RewriteCond   %{REQUEST_URI}  !^/scripts/(.*)$ RewriteCond   %{REQUEST_URI}  !^/styles/(.*)$ RewriteCond   %{REQUEST_URI}  !^/store(.*)$ RewriteCond   %{REQUEST_URI}  !^/login.htm$ RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [L,R]  # Force some URIs to be https only RewriteCond   %{SERVER_PORT}  ^80$ RewriteRule ^store(.*) https://www.example.com/store$1 [L,R]  RewriteCond   %{SERVER_PORT}  ^80$ RewriteRule ^FormSanityKey.htm https://www.example.com/login$1 [L,R] 

Read all about it at:

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_rewrite.html