| A
broken link means the server can't
find the page you've designated
in your link. The two most
common causes of this error are:
--The most common cause of broken
links is case sensitivity issues.
Our servers are case sensitive.
That means that when they look at
text an upper case letter (capital)
and a lower case letter are two
different characters. To our
server a and A
are two different things.
So, if your filename is MyPage.html
and you created your hyperlink to
refer to mypage.html the server
won't find it. Check the values
in your links against your page
names to be sure the case matches.
You may want to get in the habit
of naming your pages in all lower
case all the time. Then you
know what to use when you specify
your links.
Along the same line an error can
be caused by spaces or other characters
in your page names. The explanation
is long and complicated, but your
best habit is to replace spaces
with underscores _ and to
only use letters and numbers in
your filenames.
--The file is in a directory inside
of your web space and you didn't
designate the directory when you
created the link. If you're
using a web page creation program
like Front Page, it should take
care of all of this for you.
But in case you're not, or in case
you're program doesn't keep good
track of these things let's look
at how it works. Let's say
you had a help area on your website
where you stored help files for
your site visitors.
And you created a directory named
help to keep the help files organized
and not mixed in with your other
site files.
And let's say you have a file in
your help area called....oh, basic_help.html.
If you are on the main page of your
site and you want to create a link
directly to basic_help.html you
would need to name the link /help/basic_help.html.
If you just name the link basic_help.html
the server will look for the file
in your httpdocs folder where your
index.html page is and not find
it there.
BUT, and this is where it gets tricky....Let's
say that inside of the help folder
you had a file named main.html.
If you were editing this page and
you wanted to create a link to basic_help.html
you would just put basic_help.html
in the link.
Why?? Because main.html is
already inside of the help folder.
So when someone click a link from
main.html the server will start
looking within the directory where
main.html lives.....which is the
help directory.
AND, even trickier, if you are editing
main.html and you want to create
a link back to index.html.....you'd
have to designate that link as ../index.html.
The two dots and / tell the server
to go up one directory and look
there.
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