Does using '/' as a seperator in sementic

Question

We are new to mod_rewrite and semantic URLs and despite researching Google and SO we have not been able to find a clear answer to this question.

When we use a forward slash as a seperator in our .htaccess, all of our image, css and js references in our html have to be rewritten from relative paths to absolute paths.

For example:

RewriteRule ^([A-Za-z0-9-]+)/?$ inhalt.php?ebene1=$1 [NC,L] # process ebene1
RewriteRule ^([A-Za-z0-9-]+)\/([A-Za-z0-9-]+)/?$ inhalt.php?ebene1=$1&ebene2=$2 [NC,L] # process ebene1,2
RewriteRule ^([A-Za-z0-9-]+)\/([A-Za-z0-9-]+)\/([A-Za-z0-9-]+)/?$ inhalt.php?ebene1=$1&ebene2=$2&ebene3=$3 [NC,L] # process ebene1,2,3

means having to rewrite:

<link href="css/acssfile.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
<script type="text/javascript" src="js/ajsfile.js"></script>
<img src="imgs/animage file.gif" alt="" />

to:

<link href="http://www.oursite.com/css/acssfile.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.oursite.com/js/ajsfile.js"></script>
<img src="http://www.oursite.com/imgs/animage file.gif" alt="" />

Is this always a consequence of using forward slashes as seperators in semantic URLs, or is there a way to keep our relative paths?

Answer 1

You could probably keep your paths to resources relative to the root of your site : /css/acssfile.css, that way you don't have to care about the path of the actual page being displayed...

Answer 2

The browser is resolving those CSS includes relative to the URL it's on. If your URLs change from inhalt.php to foobar/, then the browser is now in a different path. While it was on /inhalt.php, the relative path css/acssfile.css resolves to /css/acssfile.css. However, when it's on /foobar/, that relative path resolves to /foobar/css/acssfile.css.

It's a good idea to use absolute paths, but not absolute URLs including the domain. So, link to your asset files as:

<link href="/css/acssfile.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />