On 2009-Apr-16, at 12:34 AM, Gianni wrote:

In my html files I use root-relative paths such as:

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

It's all about the context. When loaded from a web server, a browser will interpret this as relative the the server's DocumentRoot. When loaded from a local file, the browser will interpret this as relative to the root of your file system.

You would get conflicting results either way. For instance, if you had a file at "/files/index.html" and it referenced "/files/style.css", it would work when loaded from a web server. But if the browser assumed that paths in local files beginning with '/' should be relative to the current document's parent directory, then the above reference would be interpreted as "/files/files/style.css".

In other words, you're damned if you do, damned if you don't.

The Web Preview does not work even though the path is also relative to the top level of the project, I have to use paths relative to the current document.

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

This works everywhere because it is truly relative. I would switch to this method wherever possible… which is not always practical. Honestly, my "preview" is to upload to a web server and reload the page in my browser. As an alternative, don't forget that your computer has a web server already installed on it. With a little setup, you could preview things by connecting to http://localhost/.

Is there some way to get Web Preview to work with root-relative paths for html development?

There are variables you can set for a project, like TM_PROJECT_SITEURL. I'm not sure where such variables are documented or if they affect the behavior of the Web Preview, but perhaps there's something similar that can tell the Web Preview to insert a path before links beginning with '/'.