html email - should images need an absolute URL?

[blaggard]

I am using ASP to send a newsletter and it is formatted as html but I have query over image displaying between an image and a background image.

Why can i give an image a relative link and it appears in Outlook fine but if I use a relative link for a background image it doesn't appear? I have to use a site link http://www.example.com/images etc..

Is this really necessary or is there a way around this?

Asside from that the CSS style sheets formatted html email etc everything displays fine.

[edited by: tedster at 11:32 am (utc) on June 1, 2004]
[edit reason] de-link the url [/edit]

[kaled]

Never tried it, but you might be able to use the HTML <BASE> tag to specify a notional page address from which all relative addresses are calculated.

Look at the source of a google-cached page to see how it works.

Kaled.

[blaggard]

Thanks Kaled,

that worked just fine. Still not sure why background images would be treated differently, so if anyone has an answer would like to hear it!

cheers

[MatthewHSE]

The <base> tag seems to be ignored in many webmail environments. Thus, using it so you can use relative URL's in your e-mails is not a very good solution. Best thing to do with e-mail is to use all absolute URL's for everything, from CSS background images to links.