Glenn Miller wrote: > On 08 Feb 2002, Travis Crump was seen to have posted this wee note into > netscape.public.mozilla.general, to which I have responded as follows: > > >>The >>only time that all the links are changed to "absolute links" is when you >>save an entire web page or you choose Edit page in composer in >>preperation to save the entire web page which could only be considered >>desirable behavior. >> > > How can it be considered to be "desirable" to save a page with absolute > links pointing to contents on one's hard drive when one then sends that > page over to a server which most likely is on a totally different network?? > > If one uses relative links within one's website, it then is much more
I think the assumption that is being made is that if you use the process which you are evidently using that you are viewing someone else's webpage, and that even if you were planning to mirror the site that you wouldn't necessarily keep the directory structure created by someone else intact(Or if you were mirroring the entire site than the site's owner is probably aware of this and can give you a tarball or zip file of the entire site which is much easier for everyone involved). If you are editing your own website then you should have a local copy of it which you then open from within Composer with the Open File command and this 'problem' is avoided. > portable - can be placed anywhere without having to go through and edit all > those links. I only use absolute links when pointing to someone else's > website, or to contents of my own website that is hosted on a different > server. > > I agree - this bug effectively renders Composer to be unusable! > > > Glenn Miller If you want to view a page with relative links in composer then do the following: 1) Save Web page as Html Only(2nd option of the three)(say to /tmp/temp.html) 2) Open Composer 3) File->Open File, Choose the file you just saved(though I don't really understand why if you are designing a website you don't already have a local copy of everything.) 4) Voila, all your relative links are mantained just as you want. I fail to see how this 3-step process makes Composer 'unusable'... The reason that relative links can't be saved as relative links is that a lot of sites have links like "../../images/". There is no way to guarantuee(nor is it really even likely[for instance a likely place to save the webpage is ~/webpages/, ../../ then corresponds to the home directory which I don't have write access for]) that a user will have write access to ../../ from whereever he saves the page so instead the associated files are placed in a subdirectory of where the file is saved since it is known that the user must have write permissions to make that directory if s/he can save the html file there. Also I should point out that the links are still technically relative, they are just relative to the actual location of the webpage and where its accessory files are saved. The only thing that is really changed to absolute links are website links which is also reasonable since they are not all downloaded so they are nowhere to be found locally and therefore must point to the entire URL.
