Absolute Referencing And My Webhost Advice

[abigail]

I want to use absolute referencing for my css and images, because of the mod_rewrite issue in another post. So that if a user adds slash, "/", to end of url the style sheet and images would be found.

 

When I use this for includes it works:

define ('BASE_URI', '/home/advice10/public_html/');

 

But when I use it for css and images the browser doesn't find it.

 

So I asked my webhost how to do absolute referencing and explained about when the slash, "/", is added to the end the browser doesn't find the style sheet, this is what they said:

 

I believe that the absolute external reference you are looking for would be href="http://adviceofthequeen.com/minus/style/zw3c.css".

Once again the internal relative reference resolves from the file that pulls up that style sheet, however if you are looking to go a directory up, for example: the location of your client is in "public_html/example" (domain.com/example) directory, and you want to use the style sheet in the "minus" directory, the reference you could use would be "../minus/style/zw3c.css" or the above mentioned "http://adviceofthequeen.com/minus/style/zw3c.css". The ".." stands for parent directory.

You should never use the absolute reference of the server internally on a website.

 

So the 2 issues I have with this are:

 

1) Should I use the http... for style sheet and images directories?

2) I use BASE_URI for my includes directory, and does that go against what webhost said: "You should never use the absolute reference of the server internally on a website."?

[Larry]

It technically doesn't matter whether you use the http or not. I normally just start with / if I want to create an absolute reference to CSS, images, JavaScript, etc.

 

BASE_URI is a file reference to a file on the filesystem. You'd use it in a PHP script that includes another file. Filesystem reference are not meaningful in the HTML/Web browser, which is what your host is trying to convey.

[abigail]

I have it working now along with the mod_rewrite.

Like you said, I started with '/'. But I think there was a reason I didn't do it that way before and maybe it was because of subdomain. But it is working now anyway.

[Larry]

Great. Congrats!