About document locations and paths

Understanding the file path between the document you're linking from and the document you're linking to is essential to creating links.

Each Web page has a unique address, called a Uniform Resource Locator (URL). (For detailed information on URLs, see the World Wide Web Consortium's page on naming and addressing.) 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. The following are the three types of document paths:

	Absolute paths (such as http://www.macromedia.com/support/dreamweaver/contents.html). See About absolute paths.
	Document-relative paths (such as dreamweaver/contents.html). See About document-relative paths.
	Root-relative paths (such as /support/dreamweaver/contents.html). See About root-relative paths.

Using Dreamweaver, you can easily select the type of document path to create for your links. See Linking to a document.