[html] How to go up a level in the src path of a URL in HTML?

I am storing style sheets in {root}/styles while images in {root}/images for a website. How do I give the path in the style sheets to go look in the images directory for the specified images?

e.g. In background-image: url('/images/bg.png');

Here is all you need to know about relative file paths:

• Starting with / returns to the root directory and starts there

• Starting with ../ moves one directory backward and starts there

• Starting with ../../ moves two directories backward and starts there (and so on...)

• To move forward, just start with the first sub directory and keep moving forward.

Click here for more details!

Supposing you have the following file structure:

-css
  --index.css
-images
  --image1.png
  --image2.png
  --image3.png

In CSS you can access image1, for example, using the line ../images/image1.png.

NOTE: If you are using Chrome, it may doesn't work and you will get an error that the file could not be found. I had the same problem, so I just deleted the entire cache history from chrome and it worked.

Use ../:

background-image: url('../images/bg.png');

You can use that as often as you want, e.g. ../../images/ or even at different positions, e.g. ../images/../images/../images/ (same as ../images/ of course)

In Chrome when you load a website from some HTTP server both absolute paths (e.g. /images/sth.png) and relative paths to some upper level directory (e.g. ../images/sth.png) work.

But!

When you load (in Chrome!) a HTML document from local filesystem you cannot access directories above current directory. I.e. you cannot access ../something/something.sth and changing relative path to absolute or anything else won't help.

If you store stylesheets/images in a folder so that multiple websites can use them, or you want to re-use the same files on another site on the same server, I have found that my browser/Apache does not allow me to go to any parent folder above the website root URL. This seems obvious for security reasons - one should not be able to browse around on the server any place other than the specified web folders.

Eg. does not work: www.mywebsite.com/../images

As a workaround, I use Symlinks:

Go to the directory of www.mywebsite.com Run the command ln -s ../images images

Now www.mywebsite.com/images will point to www.mywebsite.com/../images