Understanding document locations and paths

Understanding the file path between the document you’re linking from and the document you’re linking to is essential to creating links.

Each web page has a unique address, called a Uniform Resource Locator (URL). For more information on URLs, see the World Wide Web Consortium website on naming and addressing at www.w3.org/Addressing/.

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.macromedia.com/support/dreamweaver/contents.html). For more information, see Absolute paths.
• Document-relative paths (such as dreamweaver/contents.html). For more information, see Document-relative paths.
• Site root-relative paths (such as /support/dreamweaver/contents.html). For more information, see Site root-relative paths.

Using Dreamweaver, you can easily select the type of document path to create for your links (see Linking files and documents).