Should I use relative or full urls in a global nav menu, which is

inserted using php includes....

[hound_dog]

Hi,

I'm using a global navigation menu, using PHP includes.

My question is:

Most areas of my site are one level down, therefore the navigation links are ../section/page.html

But some areas are more than one level down, which means the links have to be different, e.g. ../../section/page.html

This means I would have to have more than one menu file and use the appropriate one. Obviously its easier to maintain just the one file. Should I use the full links instead, e.g. [mysite.com...] This would mean only having to maintain one file... but are there any downsides? extra bandwidth? search engine issues when crawling the site?

I'm nost sure how other people get around this...

[photon]

This has been discussed in many threads [google.com] here. The (or I should say, my) short answer is that relative URLs make development somewhat easier but have several drawbacks, while absolute URLs can be more search engine friendly, make your web site less susceptible to lazy thieves, and have virtually no drawbacks.