A relative link shows the web browser how to navigate up or down the folder structure of the site in order to get to the target page.

Lottery Post, being a very large and deep site, has this problem extensively.

For example, let's look at the link to the contact page located at www.lotterypost.com/contact.aspx from a forum topic located at http://www.lotterypost.com/thread/161745.

As you can see, the contact page is located in the site's root folder, and the forum topic is located in a folder called "thread".  From the perspective of the forum topic, the contact page is located "up" in the folder structure (or "down" is you envision your root folder at the bottom), so a relative link would look like this:

<a href="../contact.aspx">Contact</a>

The two dots and the slash ("../") before the file name indicates that the browser needs to "go up one folder" to find the contact page.  If I was viewing an individual post at http://www.lotterypost.com/thread/161745/887609 I would need to go up two folders, so I'd put "../../" before the file name.

When coding a huge site it becomes immensely difficult to maintain all those relative paths, especially when you decide to change the folder of a page.

For example, if I changed the topic page one level deeper (like www.lotterypost.com/forums/thread/161745), I would need to remember to change the relative page to the contact page inside it.

With hundreds of links on every page, the problem is magnified.

ASP.NET helps with "Web application root operator"

ASP.NET introduced a tilde character ("~") as a new operator called the "Web application root operator".  The operator only works with server controls.

Its function....

[ More ]