On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 12:27:58PM +0000, Stuart wrote: > 2009/2/17 Paul M Foster <paulf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>: > > On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 08:34:22PM +0000, Stuart wrote: > > > > <snip> > > > >> This is your problem, you're not understanding where the paths are > >> being resolved. Apache has absolutely no involvement in resolving > >> relative paths in your HTML files to absolute URLs. The browser does > >> this. All you need to do is use absolute URLs and everything will work > >> fine. By absolute, in case you don't know, I mean starting with a / > >> and being "from" the document root in the web server. > > > > FWIW, I've been doing computers since before the CP/M days > > (pre-pre-DOS), so I do know the difference between absolute and relative > > paths. > > FWIW I've been "doing" computers for a long time also, and am well > aware of CP/M. Based on what you said it didn't appear that you did > know the difference, but I apologise for the mistake. I'm sure if you > look at the URLs being requested by the browser it should be pretty > clear that it's simply adding the paths you have in your HTML to the > end of the existing URL. The fact that you didn't appear to have seen > that informed my assumption. Well, the only way I know this is to look at the Apache logs. I was getting a lot of 3xx and 4xx errors (which don't show up directly in the browser), and looking at the requests, it appears that the browser is indeed dictating the place to find images, etc., based on the odd URL. > > > I'm a little doubtful about the browser specifying things like the URLs > > for links within a HTML page. However, this would explain why there are > > separate entries for image fetches in the Apache logs, occurring after > > the main page has been requested. Do you have some reference for this? > > I'd like to read more about the server-client interaction in depth. > > I couldn't find any references so I wrote a quick overview of what the > process is. Note that this is over-simplified but should get the basic > process across. > > * Browser connects to the HTTP server on www.google.com and requests / > > * Server resolves / to a resource, commonly an HTML file, PHP script > or whatever, processes it if necessary and sends the output back to > the browser. > > * Browser receives the HTML content, parses it, builds a list of > referenced URLs (images, scripts, stylesheets, etc) > > * Browser normalises each referenced URL according to a fairly simple > set of rules... > > If the URL is not already in the form scheme://... > If the URL does not start with a / > // The URL is relative to the current location > If current_url ends with / > URL = current_url + URL > Else > URL = dirname(current_url) + '/' + URL > Fi > Else > // The URL is absolute on the current domain > // current_domain is everything needed to hit the > same web server, > so scheme://[[username]:password@]domain.com > URL = current_domain + URL > Fi > Else > // URL is already absolute, including the scheme, domain > name, etc > Fi > > * Browser then (usually) fires off a couple of threads to request the > additional URLs, renders the page and executes any scripts it > contains. > > The server has absolutely no involvement in resolving referenced URLs > to complete URLs - this is all done by the browser. HTTP is stateless > to the extreme, meaning that each request gets a single resource, even > if they're done through the same connection. > > Hope that makes it clearer. Thanks for the summary. <snip> > > > > So specifying absolute links might be a bit much. I'm not happy with the > > way DW handles this stuff, but I have to strike a balance between my > > vim-handcoding-command-line method and my wife's > > click-and-drag-gotta-be-GUI method. > > We've covered this in the other thread. I can't speak for DW since > I've only ever used it as a text editor, and even then only when > forced, but I would be surprised if you couldn't tell it to generate > absolute URLs. Something I do know is that you can set it up to > automatically deploy to a separate virtual host on your development > server, but based on the other thread you've already made a decision > on how to solve your problem. I leave Dreamweaver issues to my wife. She maintains she can manually type in the link URLs, but that's really not a good ongoing paradigm. Now, if Dreamweaver had a config setting that said, "Make all URLs absolute", I'd say that's the best resolution. Paul -- Paul M. Foster -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
