Does <A HREF hyperlink require "http://..."?

[Yeah]

Is it absolutely necessary to include "http://" in an A HREF hyperlink?
Would it be wise to remove this from one's Links page, just to save code?

[Barbara de Zoete]

On Wed, 04 Jan 2006 18:46:49 +0100, Yeah <ye**@positive. net> wrote:

Is it absolutely necessary to include "http://" in an A HREF hyperlink?
Only for http addresses:

<URL:http://www.w3.org/Addressing/URL/5_BNF.html>
Would it be wise to remove this from one's Links page, just to save code?

If you remove it, it is no longer a URL. That doesn't sound 'wise' to me.
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[Darin McGrew]

Yeah <ye**@positive. net> wrote:

Is it absolutely necessary to include "http://" in an A HREF hyperlink?
Yes.
Would it be wise to remove this from one's Links page, just to save code?

As an example, the link page at http://www.htmlhelp.com/links/ could use
href="http://www.example.com/" and the link would refer to
http://www.example.com/

But if the link page at http://www.htmlhelp.com/links/ used
href="www.examp le.com/" instead, then the link would refer to
http://www.htmlhelp.com/links/www.example.com/ which is not the same thing
at all.

See also http://www.htmlhelp.com/faq/html/bas...l#relative-url
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[David Dorward]

Yeah wrote:

Is it absolutely necessary to include "http://" in an A HREF hyperlink?
Would it be wise to remove this from one's Links page, just to save code?

If you don't include the protocol, then it is a relative link, so if you
have a page at http://example.com/foo/index.html and links with
href="www.examp le.net" and href="http://www.example.org " the links would be
to "http://www.example.com/foo/www.example.net " and
"http://www.example.org ".

--
David Dorward <http://blog.dorward.me .uk/> <http://dorward.me.uk/>
Home is where the ~/.bashrc is

[Harlan Messinger]

Yeah wrote:

Is it absolutely necessary to include "http://" in an A HREF hyperlink?
Would it be wise to remove this from one's Links page, just to save code?

If you had

href="www.examp le.com/mypage.html"

on the page located at http://www.example.com/otherpage.html, following
the usual rules for interpreting relative URLs, the browser would
interpret it as

http://www.example.com/www.example.com/mypage.html

[lunaticfringe]

Yeah Wrote:

Is it absolutely necessary to include "http://" in an A HREF hyperlink?
Would it be wise to remove this from one's Links page, just to save
code?

It depends on where the link is going. If you are on the same URL then
you don't need it.

example
<a href="new.html" > this is within the same folder on the same URL
<a href="images/picture.jpg"> this is within the same URL in a
subfolder
<a href="../file.html"> this is within the same URL but in the folder
above

If the link is going to an outside URL or you have trouble with being
within a subfolder and accessing outside of it then yes you may need to
make an absolute URL for it to follow.

Saving code really depends on what is on the page (amount of links and
size) and SEO.
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[Bruce Lewis]

Darin McGrew <mc****@stanfor dalumni.org> writes:

See also http://www.htmlhelp.com/faq/html/bas...l#relative-url

I want to amplify Darin's reference, because this page includes the
important example href="./" that is too often neglected. If you have a
default file, using href="./" in place of href="index.htm l" and such
will mean consistent URLs instead of http://example.com/ and
http://example.com/index.html having the same content.

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photos for your family or group.

[Stan Brown]

Wed, 4 Jan 2006 11:46:49 -0600 from Yeah <ye**@positive. net>:

Is it absolutely necessary to include "http://" in an A HREF hyperlink?
No, of course not -- sometimes it's wrong to include that.
Would it be wise to remove this from one's Links page, just to save code?

No, that would be stupid.
But you're not asking the right question. The _right_ question is,
what's the path from the current page to the linked page? If both are
on the same server, you want a relative link; if not, you want an
absolute link. The absolute link always needs the protocol, news: or
http:// or whatever. The relative link never has the protocol or
server and, depending on details, will also omit some of the leading
"directory" names.

--
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http://OakRoadSystems.com/
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[Eric Lindsay]

In article <nm************ *@grumpy-fuzzball.mit.ed u>,
Bruce Lewis <br*****@yahoo. com> wrote:

Darin McGrew <mc****@stanfor dalumni.org> writes:

See also http://www.htmlhelp.com/faq/html/bas...l#relative-url

I want to amplify Darin's reference, because this page includes the
important example href="./" that is too often neglected. If you have a
default file, using href="./" in place of href="index.htm l" and such
will mean consistent URLs instead of http://example.com/ and
http://example.com/index.html having the same content.

I like that. So the idea is you could change all your references now to
an older style default file like href="index.htm " to href="./" Then
where you finally get around to making your default file "index.html "
(or "default.ht ml" or whatever a newer default file name is) you don't
need to make a change to any of your HTML default page references?

Are there any disadvantages? Extra lookup time vs having the path
including the actual file name used?

--
http://www.ericlindsay.com

[David Ross]

Yeah wrote:

Is it absolutely necessary to include "http://" in an A HREF hyperlink?
Would it be wise to remove this from one's Links page, just to save code?

In addition to all the other answers about relative links, you
should recognize that not all links use the hyper-text transfer
protocol (HTTP). For example, a link to send E-mail to the
anti-spam address I used for this message would be
<a href="mail:no** **@nowhere.not" >Mail to me</a>

And a link to reach this newsgroup through your default news server
would be
<a href="news:comp .infosystems.ww w.authoring.htm l">Authoring
HTML</a>
Specifying a particular news server would be
<a
href="news://news.vcnet.com/comp.infosystem s.www.authoring .html">Authorin g
HTML</a>

Generally, when I refer to a page in my own Web site from another
page in the same site, I user relative links. This facilitates
both testing and rehosting.

For testing, links relative to my home page allow me to recreate my
Web site in a local directory on my PC. This means that I can
navigate through my site without even connecting to the Internet.
Thus, I can check the appearance of a page and the integrity of
links without having to upload the pages to a Web server.

If I want to rehost my Web site, none of my links require
changing. I only have to change text that cites the domain. Yes,
I now have a personal domain, which means that rehosting merely
requires pointing the domain to the new server and uploading the
files, even if my links used complete URLs. However, if I were to
change the name of my domain, relative links mean that I would not
have to change them.

--

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