Why Some Professional Web Designers Use Absolute Paths Instead Of Relative Paths (e.g For Css, Javascript, Images, Etc.)?

I used to think that everyone used relative paths (e.g. /styles/style.css). But I wonder why some popuar web designers (e.g. http://www.getfinch.com and http://31three.com/) use ab

Solution 1:

Both of those are using ExpressionEngine CMS, it's probably the way the CMS links the stylesheets.

But really it's just a matter of preference. Personally I go with root relative /css/main.css because this way if I'm developing locally + offline I don't have to worry about switching the WEB_ROOT constant to a local one ( less hassle + shorter ).

The only case I see for absolute is if the domain uses a CDN ( content delivery network ) and the domain is different from the origin domain.

Solution 2:

Good thread on Google Webmaster Central... Discusses about Google crawling perspective and easy of migration.

Relative Path vs Absolute Path

Solution 3:

I would say either personal preference (most likely), or portability, if your files are referencing a fully qualified URL you don't need to include those files when using the html elsewhere, it'll continue pulling from the remote site.

It depends more on the platform than anything else in my experience, for example .Net uses ~/ for application root, which renders as /path/file.css in the HTML, just because that's an easy path to render from the code side...path of least resistance deal there.

Another case would be if you're loading stuff from another domain, for example sstatic.net here, you don't have a choice really, it has to be fully qualified.

Solution 4:

I think it's only a matter of preference. I prefer relative URLs because it's less of a pain to change if you're changing (sub)domains. But if you have a CMS or blog it usually handles that for you anyways (e.g. {SITE_URL}/path/to/page).

Solution 5:

Not sure about those specific sites, but often people use different urls for static resource files for efficiency purposes (not personal preference). Most browsers have a limit on the number of concurrent connections to a single url while loading the page, and you can bypass that restriction by serving files some files from a different url, which would require an absolute path. This helps pages load faster and is a common practice.