Absolute+and+relative+page+addressing

Absolute page addressing
An absolute page address is an address which specifies exactly the location of a file on a server, and the server itself.

In the diagram below, the absolute address for the web page index.html would be **http://www.mysite.com/index.html**.

Similarly, the absolute address for the web page topnews.html would be **http://www.mysite.com/news/topnews.html**.



Relative page addressing
Relative page addressing is different in that it does not state the full URL of the address. Instead, it references files and folders relative to each other.

In the example above, index.html would have the relative page address of **/index.html** and topnews.html would have the relative page address of **/news/topnews.html**.

The benefits of relative addressing
Relative addressing is often used when hyper-linking pages in a website. If at any point the user decides to migrate their website from www.mysite.com to www.mynewsite.com, all the relative links will continue to work. However, absolute addresses will continue to point to www.mysite.com and so each link would need to be updated manually.