Another question,

Which is preferred, absolute or relative links for embedded URLs?

I can probably guess what your answer will be, but I'll go into some 
detail here:

When I first started web designing (1994), I only had a dialup 
connection that, for obvious reasons, I had to minimize my time on 
(primarily because I was living with my parents at the time.  :) )  
Therefore, I got in the habit of, when I was offline designing with 
Notepad, I'd make all my hyperlinks to internal documents (like 
pictures, other pages within the site, etc.) relative, so that I don't 
have to fire up the browser when I check it, I can just use my offline 
copy that I have saved to my HD, a practice I have gotten in the 
habit of doing and still use to this day.

I find many advantages to using relative links, even though I have a 
cable modem now and no longer live with my parents.  :)  Firstly, I 
always have a hard drive copy of all my clients pages, comes in 
handy a lot of times.  Also, I can compose changes at my leisure 
and put them up all at once (if I change a picture that a URL points 
to in the new version, having an absolute link would of course keep 
pointing to the old picture, unless I upload the new picture, thereby 
making the old page that's curently online look different ... )  It also 
makes it easirer to diagnose if the problem is with the code or 
something online.

However, I'm finding more and more pages are created with 
absolute links now.  (Granted, it's the old "if all  your friends jumped 
off a bridge ... " principle at work, more and more pages now are 
having tables used for positioning too (a habit I'm trying to break 
myself of))  There must be a reason for it.  I have noticed one 
advantage that I might use for it is, when using domain name 
forwarding that's masked, relative links still show the true url in the 
status bar on the bottom of the web browser when hovering, 
absolute links wil probably fix that (and is the reason I'm thinking of 
making the change.)

So, what's the general consensus, absolute or relative?
 
--
David Kendall - president / chief web designer
Home Pages Plus! 
(204) 254-3649
david(at)homepagesplus.com
www.homepagesplus.com

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