Operation Manual

257

Last updated 3/28/2012

Chapter 9: Linking and navigation

About linking and navigation

About links

After you’ve set up a Dreamweaver site to store your website documents and have created HTML pages, you’ll want to

create connections from your documents to other documents.

Dreamweaver provides several ways to create links to documents, images, multimedia files, or downloadable software.

You can establish links to any text or image anywhere within a document, including text or images in a heading, list,

table, absolutely-positioned element (AP element), or frame.

There are several different ways of creating and managing links. Some web designers prefer to create links to

nonexistent pages or files as they work, while others prefer to create all the files and pages first and then add the links.

Another way to manage links is to create placeholder pages, in which you add and test links before completing all your

site pages.

More Help topics

“Test links in Dreamweaver” on page 266

Absolute, document-relative, and site root-relative paths

Understanding the file path between the document you’re linking from and the document or asset you’re linking to is

essential to creating links.

Each web page has a unique address, called a Uniform Resource Locator (URL). However, when you create a local link

(a link from one document to another on the same site), you generally don’t specify the entire URL of the document

you’re linking to; instead, you specify a relative path from the current document or from the site’s root folder.

There are three types of link paths:

• Absolute paths (such as http://www.adobe.com/support/dreamweaver/contents.html).

• Document-relative paths (such as dreamweaver/contents.html).

• Site root–relative paths (such as /support/dreamweaver/contents.html).

Using Dreamweaver, you can easily select the type of document path to create for your links.

Note: It is best to use the type of linking you prefer and are most comfortable with—either site root- or document-

relative. Browsing to links, as opposed to typing in the paths, ensures that you always enter the right path.