Thanks everyone, it's clear

RTFVerterra — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 15:05:49 +0000

Thanks everyone, it's clear to me now when to use and when not to use absolute and relative url.

decibel.places wrote:

...proper terms are "absolute url" ... and "relative url"

...RTFVerterra's engineering forum is Drupal...

...Drupal has a handy module named Pathologic...

Thanks for the proper terms and for the Pathologic module, I'll check it out. For now, I need to go to bed, it's almost midnight here. Thanks again.

the proper terms are

decibel.places — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 14:49:39 +0000

the proper terms are "absolute url" -- "http://www.example.com/folder/file.html"

and "relative url" -- "/folder/file.html"

(note also that a relative url beginning with a slash is not the same as one without)

The advantage of relative urls is that you can more easily develop a site on one server and move it to another, and the urls will still work

You are correct that relative urls for images do not display in feeds, Drupal has a handy module named Pathologic that converts relative urls to absolute ones.

(Why am I mentioning Drupal? Because I know that RTFVerterra's engineering forum is Drupal)

Greg K wrote:

one of the benefits of using method #2 is you could then apply dom scripting to auto open "external links" in a new tab/window by checking the href for beginning with something other that "/"

Drupal also has a handy extlink module that can add an icon and/or open external links in a new tab/window

#2 also lets you move to a

Megan — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 14:45:13 +0000

#2 also lets you move to a new domain more easily, if that ever becomes necessary.

#1 might be a good option in things like blog posts where other sites could be scraping your content. I would only do it if I found that was happening though...

we use #2 due to the fact

Greg K — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 14:34:13 +0000

we use #2 due to the fact that our dev sites are on their own server, and thus require no changing of code when they move to live site.

ie.
LIVE: sitedomain.com
DEV: sitedomain.com.devdomain.com

now in our sites, a constant does get set up to grab the actual domain from the server for times that the full path is needed (mainly only on things that get e-mailed out)

one of the benefits of using method #2 is you could then apply dom scripting to auto open "external links" in a new tab/window by checking the href for beginning with something other that "/"

-Greg