Two Common Causes Of Bad Links

[troyzone]

Hi Everyone,

Here are a couple of little tips that should make your life with HTML easier and could potentially save you a lot of headaches. Straying outside of these general guidelines is often a cause of "file not found" and other such errors normally associated with bad or nonfunctional links. I realize that this is going back to basics, but often such things are the underlying cause of the problems that we encounter, and if we have a shaky foundation then it's hard to build more advanced knowledge on top of that.

• Don't use any spaces in filenames. Internet addresses technically cannot contain spaces, so if some of your web pages have spaces in their file names, web servers/browsers tend to replace these invalid characters with their ASCII character code equivalents. As a result, you end up with URLs that have ugly things like %20 stuck in the middle of them. If your original link on your web page isn't written in this manner as well then it may not work. If you really want a space in a filename, substitute a different character such as an underscore "_ "or hyphen "-" instead. More info on allowable vs. unsafe characters to use in URLs can be found here: www.blooberry.com/indexdot/html/topics/urlencoding.htm
  
  
• Avoid capital letters in Internet addresses and filenames, and always use lowercase characters whenever possible. Another general convention of the Internet is for web site addresses and email addresses to be all lowercase characters. This is to avoid confusion and because many web servers, especially Unix-based servers, are case-sensitive. For instance, the file names index.html, Index.html, and INDEX.HTML could all be treated as different files depending on the server. So, if you have a link on your web page pointing to index.html and you actually named your file Index.html, the link may not work. It has to match exactly. There may be times when you find it desirable to put some capitalization in your links (such as for marketing or readability purposes), but if you choose to do this, you should be very careful to make sure that your links in your emails or web pages and the names of the files that they are pointing to match exactly.

I was initially replying with these possible causes to a post in another thread regarding problems with links, but I thought I would post this here for everyone's benefit, as I'm sure we've all run into these types of problems at one time or another. I know this is pretty basic stuff but it is important regardless, and you can get into a real mess if you are not aware of these Internet conventions, as they are sometimes taken for granted.

I hope this helps some people sort out issues with their links.

Troy

[Tom "CloudHand"]

Great tips Troy!

To expand further on bullet point #2 ...
Domain names are not affected by case sensitivity, thus yourdomain.com and YourDomain.com will be equally resolved. But, as Troy pointed out, this is not true for file names and folder names (i.e. - anything following the domain name).

Great things to keep in mind when creating links.

--Tom

[Elaine Currie]

Hello,

This is probably a bit basic but it has affected me in the past and will probably cause headaches to people starting out with HTML.

A missing (or extra) " can cause absolute havoc! It does not always create the same effect - I once had a webpage where a great chunk of text would not display. Eventually I tracked it down to an unclosed apostrophe. Now when I get a peculiar result I can't account for, I look for the " first.