Adobe Dreamweaver CC 2015 - Manual (Page 341)

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Last updated 6/3/2015
Chapter 8: Linking and navigation
About linking and navigation
Note: The user interface has been simplified in Dreamweaver CC and later. As a result, you may not find some of the
options described in this article in Dreamweaver CC and later. For more information, see
this article .
About links
After you’ve set up a Dreamweaver site to store your website documents and have created HTML pages, you’ll want to
create connections from your documents to other documents.
Dreamweaver provides several ways to create links to documents, images, multimedia files, or downloadable software.
You can establish links to any text or image anywhere within a document, including text or images in a heading, list,
table, absolutely-positioned element (AP element), or frame.
There are several different ways of creating and managing links. Some web designers prefer to create links to
nonexistent pages or files as they work, while others prefer to create all the files and pages first and then add the links.
Another way to manage links is to create placeholder pages, in which you add and test links before completing all your
site pages.
Absolute, document-relative, and site root-relative paths
Understanding the file path between the document you’re linking from and the document or asset you’re linking to is
essential to creating links.
Each web page has a unique address, called a Uniform Resource Locator (URL). 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.adobe.com/support/dreamweaver/contents.html).
• Document-relative paths (such as dreamweaver/contents.html).
• Site root–relative paths (such as /support/dreamweaver/contents.html).
Using Dreamweaver, you can easily select the type of document path to create for your links.
Note: It is best to use the type of linking you prefer and are most comfortable with—either site root- or document-relative.
Browsing to links, as opposed to typing in the paths, ensures that you always enter the right path.
Absolute paths
Absolute paths provide the complete URL of the linked document, including the protocol to use (usually http:// for web
pages), for example, http://www.adobe.com/support/dreamweaver/contents.html. For an image asset, the complete
URL might be something like http://www.adobe.com/support/dreamweaver/images/image1.jpg.