Relative links are important if you must link to files that are published separately. Relative links protect the links on your pages if your ISP moves or changes the server location. To create a relative link, you must know where the destination file is relative to the file containing the link.
For example, suppose you publish a site using the by Site Section publishing option. Your company PR department wants to place HTML documents on the server, but publish them separately from the main Web site. The PR department has its own Articles directory on the server at the root of the site. There is also a News directory and the index page for the site at the root of the site. The structure looks something like this:
index.html
/News
news.html
/Articles
PressRelease1.html
PressRelease2.html
The main News page is published in the News directory. You must create a relative link to link the news.html page to the articles in the Articles directory.
To create a relative link:
In Page view, select some text or select an object to link.
On the Standard toolbar, click the Link tool.
The Link dialog appears.
Select the External Link type.
Select (none) from the New link drop-down list.
In the text entry field, type the relative path from the news page to the press release page. For example: ../Articles/PressRelease1.html
You cannot test this link by previewing, because it requires the exact configuration of files that only exists on the server. However, after you publish the site and the PR department uploads articles into the Articles directory, the link will work correctly.
When typing the path, if you do not include periods or slashes in front of the file name, NetObjects Fusion attempts to find the file in the same directory as the page containing the link. This is also true for the format ./filename.html. To back up one directory before looking for the path, use ../path/filename.html. For each directory you need to back up to find the destination file, include another ../. For example, suppose you create a Press Releases page in a directory called PR within the News directory:
index.html
/News
news.html
/PR