Operation Manual

259

USING DREAMWEAVER

Linking and navigation

Last updated 3/28/2012

Site root–relative paths

Site root–relative paths describe the path from the site’s root folder to a document. You may want to use these paths if

you are working on a large website that uses several servers, or one server that hosts several sites. However, if you are

not familiar with this type of path, you may want to stick to document-relative paths.

A site root–relative path begins with a leading forward slash, which stands for the root folder of the site. For example,

/support/tips.html is a site root–relative path to a file (tips.html) in the support subfolder of the site’s root folder.

A site root–relative path is often the best way to specify links if you frequently move HTML files from one folder to

another in your website. When you move a document that contains site root–relative links, you don’t need to change

the links since the links are relative to the site root, and not to the document itself; for example, if your HTML files use

site root–relative links for dependent files (such as images), then if you move an HTML file, its dependent-file links

are still valid.

However, when you move or rename the documents targeted by site root–relative links, you must update those links,

even if the documents’ paths relative to each other haven’t changed. For example, if you move a folder, you must

update all site root–relative links to files in that folder. (If you move or rename files using the Files panel, Dreamweaver

updates all relevant links automatically.)

Linking

Linking files and documents

Before creating a link, make sure you understand how absolute, document-relative, and site root–relative paths work.

You can create several types of links in a document:

• A link to another document or to a file, such as a graphic, movie, PDF, or sound file.

• A named anchor link, which jumps to a specific location in a document.

• An e-mail link, which creates a new blank e-mail message with the recipient’s address already filled in.

• Null and script links, which you use to attach behaviors to an object or to create a link that executes JavaScript code.

You can use the Property inspector and the Point-To-File icon to create links from an image, an object, or text to

another document or file.

Dreamweaver creates the links to other pages in your site using document-relative paths. You can also tell

Dreamweaver to create new links using site root–relative paths.

Important: Always save a new file before creating a document-relative path; a document-relative path is not valid

without a definite starting point. If you create a document-relative path before saving the file, Dreamweaver temporarily

uses an absolute path beginning with file:// until the file is saved; when you save the file, Dreamweaver converts the file://

path to a relative path.

For a tutorial on creating links, see www.adobe.com/go/vid0149.