Templates and Broken Images

When relative URLs are used in templates for images, links, and external files like CSS and JavaScript, the URLs can break when the page is used.

Relative links work when the web page is displayed with the URL where the page is actually at. But if the software makes a copy of the page and then displays the page from within itself, the URL in the browser is different than the URL of the web page. That causes relative links to break.

The solution is to either use absolute http://... URLs throughout the template web page or, which might be easier, put a BASE tag into the page. The BASE tag's href would be the absolute URL of the template web page file.

The BASE tag tells the browser to determine relative URLs as if the page was at the URL specified in the BASE tag, regardless where the page is actually displayed at.

Example:

<base href="http://www.example.net/answer.html" />

The BASE tag should be the first line of the head area above the first place where a relative URL is used. For example, if you import an external CSS file with a relative URL, the BASE tag should be above it.

Will Bontrager