You can link Developer content to Internet or intranet web pages or other content files such as documents and spreadsheets on a web server by linking to the document's URL address. Linking to a URL allows you to access content that is maintained outside of the Library.
When linking to a URL, you can type the entire absolute address of the linked content and preview it to confirm the correct address. However, you may want to link to content that has not yet been deployed, and you are unsure of the final web server for deployment. For example, you create supplemental content that is used by several customers who deploy it on different servers. In this case, you cannot enter the absolute address of the URL.
If the location of linked content is in a common base path, you can use relative URLs instead of absolute. Relative URLs are addresses which are relative to a configurable base address. The base address can be set in the Developer for previewing and in the Player package after publishing. With relative URLs, you can temporarily load the web content locally, or on a server you can access, and then create and verify the links in your content. After deploying the linked content on the permanent web server, you can edit one file in the published Player content with the location. Using relative URLs also makes it easier to update the content if the web server is moved to another location.
When using relative URLs, you do not enter the base address; instead you enter the rest of the URL path using standard URL conventions (see Add a Relative URL in the Work with Relative URLs section of the Enhance Content with URLs chapter for more information about standard URL conventions).
Example: You want to create links to the following URLs on a web server:
http://abc-srv/us/support/index.html
http://abc-srv/us/downloads/index.html
http://abc-srv/us/products/middleware/default.html
http://abc-srv/us/products/database/list.docx
With "http://abc-srv/us" as the base URL address, you can use the following relative addresses to create the links:
./support/index.html
./downloads/index.html
./products/middleware/default.html
./products/database/list.docx