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A broken link
means the server can't find the page you've designated in your
link. The two most common causes of this error are:
--The most common cause of broken links is case sensitivity
issues. Our servers are case sensitive. That means
that when they look at text an upper case letter (capital) and
a lower case letter are two different characters. To our
server a and A are two different
things. So, if your filename is MyPage.html and you
created your hyperlink to refer to mypage.html the server
won't find it. Check the values in your links against
your page names to be sure the case matches. You may
want to get in the habit of naming your pages in all lower
case all the time. Then you know what to use when you
specify your links.
Along the same line an error can be caused by spaces or other
characters in your page names. The explanation is long
and complicated, but your best habit is to replace spaces with
underscores _ and to only use letters and numbers in
your filenames.
--The file is in a directory inside of your web space and you
didn't designate the directory when you created the
link. If you're using a web page creation program like
Front Page, it should take care of all of this for you.
But in case you're not, or in case you're program doesn't keep
good track of these things let's look at how it works.
Let's say you had a help area on your website where you stored
help files for your site visitors. And you created a
directory named help to keep the help files organized and not
mixed in with your other site files. And let's say you
have a file in your help area called....oh, basic_help.html.
If you are on the main page of your site and you want to
create a link directly to basic_help.html you would need to
name the link /help/basic_help.html. If you just name
the link basic_help.html the server will look for the file in
your httpdocs folder where your index.html page is and not
find it there. BUT, and this is where it gets
tricky....Let's say that inside of the help folder you had a
file named main.html. If you were editing this page and
you wanted to create a link to basic_help.html you would just
put basic_help.html in the link. Why?? Because
main.html is already inside of the help folder. So when
someone click a link from main.html the server will start
looking within the directory where main.html lives.....which
is the help directory. AND, even trickier, if you are
editing main.html and you want to create a link back to
index.html.....you'd have to designate that link as ../index.html.
The two dots and / tell the server to go up one directory and
look there.
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