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JavaScript

Brendan Whiting
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Brendan Whiting
Front End Web Development Techdegree Graduate 84,738 Points
Posted by Brendan Whiting
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Brendan Whiting
Front End Web Development Techdegree Graduate 84,738 Points

Node/Express: help understanding how servers and files work

So I have an index.html file that links to a style sheet:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="css/style.css"/>

I can open up index.html in the browser and view it just fine.

But if I write it like this:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="/css/style.css"/>

with the forward slash at the beginning of the url, it won't load the stylesheet this way. I have to start up a server in order to have the css come through in the browser.

What's the difference between the url with and without the forward slash? Why does it behave differently, and which method is best in real life?

1 Answer

Jonathan Grieve
MOD
Jonathan Grieve
Treehouse Moderator 91,253 Points
Jonathan Grieve
Jonathan Grieve
Treehouse Moderator 91,253 Points

For the link tag it's best practice noto include a preceding forward slash. Remember it's a path to the file relative to the location of the HTML file.

Putting a forward slash in makes it an absolute path, :-)