html - external style sheets, specifying absolute or relative paths

Question

the href portion of the the link tag for including external stylesheets is confusing to me, especially since most folks don't use an entire URL.

For example, in

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

if I wanted to put my stylesheet in a subdirectory off wwwroot, what would be the difference in attempting to reference it via:

a) href="/someDir/mystyles.css"

b) href="./someDir/mystyles.css"

c) href="someDir/mystyles.css"

Thanks Much

Answer 1

This is basic relative URL syntax. There is nothing CSS specific about this.

Assuming this appears in http://example.com/foo/bar/index.html

href="/someDir/mystyles.css"

http://example.com/someDir/mystyles.css

href="./someDir/mystyles.css"

http://example.com/foo/bar/someDir/mystyles.css

href="someDir/mystyles.css"

http://example.com/foo/bar/someDir/mystyles.css

And you didn't mention href="../someDir/mystyles.css"

Which would be: http://example.com/foo/someDir/mystyles.css