When I say absolute, as an example scenario say that you keep all of your included files in a folder named /ssi
The links to other files should start with a /
A link to your home page might look like "/" or '/index.html"
Lets say that you have your css style sheets in a folder named /css
a link to the css style sheet might look like:
The main reason for using this type of an absolute link is so that Dreamweaver does not become confused. if you use relative links what can happen is...
Say you have your included files in a folder named /ssi and you have an index page in a folder named /about. It you use a relative link to this file and the link looks like "about/index.html" When dreamweaver looks at this link it will look in /ssi/about/index.html rather than at "/about/index.html" adding the / before the link allows dreamweaver to find the link properly.
For includes:
Most includes are done like this:
however, this will not work with a dreamweaver template because dreamweaver assumes this to be a relative link and will look in "/Templates/ssi/" for the file and when it places the links into your pages that are based on this template Dreamweaver will insert "../Templates/ssi/top.html" To avoid this use the following include statement:
This tells dreamweaver and the server that the location of the file is relative to the document root and not relative from the page location.
You can also use the following, but I have seen this break in sites with multi-level file structures.
A php include might look something like:
_ROOT'].'/ssi/top.php'); ?>
The main reason that many (at least from my experience) have trouble meshing Templates and Include files is that they do not get the relationships of the includes to the template correct. Another problem usually seems to be with broken links because many developers make the mistake of putting in links that are relative to the included file rather than from the page the include will be included in. Relative links will break if you use a multi level file structure to hold different sections of the website and also try to incorporate any type of includes.
And again, none of this really matters as far as SEO is concerned, because search engines only see what your browser sees, which is a file with all the parts put together as they belong.
