The right way of setting a href when it s a local file

Question

I m trying to link to a local file  I ve set href as follows    lt a href  file   C  path to file file html  gt Link Anchor lt  a gt     In Firefox  when I right click and  open link in new tab   nothing happens  When I right click and  copy link location   then manually open a new tab and paste the copied link  it works fine  So it seems my file    syntax is fine  I ve also tried it with 3 slashes like file     but it s the same result     What am I doing wrong

User · Answer

This can happen when you are running IIS and you run the html page through it  then the Local file system will not be accessible   To make your link work locally the run the calling html page directly from file browser not visual studio F5 or IIS simply click it to open from the file system  and make sure you are using the link like this    lt a href  file    F  VS 2015 WorkSpace Projects xyz Intro html  gt Intro lt  a gt

User · Answer

By definition  file  URLs are system-dependent  and they have little use  A URL as in your example works when used locally  i e  the linking page itself is in the user   s computer  But browsers generally refuse to follow file  links on a page that it has fetched with the HTTP protocol  so that the page s own URL is an http  URL  When you click on such a link  nothing happens  The purpose is presumably security  to prevent a remote page from accessing files in the visitor   s computer   I think this feature was first implemented in Mozilla  then copied to other browsers    So if you work with HTML documents in your computer  the file  URLs should work  though there are system-dependent issues in their syntax  how you write path names and file names in such a URL    If you really need to work with an HTML document on your computers and another HTML document on a web server  the way to make links work is to use the local file as primary and  if needed  use client-side scripting to fetch the document from the server

User · Answer

Try swapping your colon   for a bar    that should do it   lt a href  file   C  path to file file html  gt Link Anchor lt  a gt

User · Answer

Organize your files in hierarchical directories and then just use relative paths   Demo   HTML  index html    lt a href  inner file html  gt link lt  a gt    Directory structure   base  base index html base inner file html

User · Answer

The href value inside the base tag will become your reference point for all your relative paths and thus override your current directory path value otherwise - the     is the root of your site       lt head gt           lt base href        gt       lt  head gt

User · Answer

htmlfilename with  html User can do this This will solve your problem of redirection to anypage for local files

[html] The right way of setting <a href=""> when it's a local file

Examples related to html

Examples related to file

Examples related to firefox

Examples related to hyperlink

Examples related to href