We've just launched an ambitious news portal for the University of
California at Berkeley, dipping our toes into CSS waters while
trying to stay accessible to the unfortunately large portion of
campus stuck on NN4. (Site critiques welcome, but not the reason
for this plea.) The site resides at
http://www.berkeley.edu/news/index.html, but we're promoting it
widely under the alias http://newscenter.berkeley.edu. Therein lies
the rub. Before launch, we discovered that links to stories FROM
the NewsCenter page needed to be absolute or else they would
break trying to resolve relative links from newscenter.berkeley.edu.
That was only a small inconvenience, but the things we discovered
after launch are a major headache -- the paths to the stylesheets
and the SSIs on the page also cannot be resolved when the
browser is pointed to newscenter.berkeley.edu, resulting in a very
ugly and incomplete page.

I got around that -- I hope temporarily -- by giving the stylesheet
calls an absolute path, and by including all the content from the
SSIs on the page body itself. But the stylesheet solution in
particular is a problem, because Dreamweaver apparently can't
handle absolute pathing for stylesheet links, and thus displays an
unstyled page in design view (it's fine if I preview, but doing that to
check every little change is a major pain). Plus being unable to use
SSIs (which can't do absolute pathing anywhere) greatly restricts
our ability to have multiple people update the page. Are there any
changes that can be made, either to the Dreamweaver
configuration or on the server end, that could resolve these
dilemmas? (Server-side changes may be somewhat problematical --
we don't run the server, and cannot always get those who do to
make changes that would make our lives easier, because they
have other users to consider as well.) Thanks in advance for any
light you can shed.

~ Steve McConnell
Web news editor, UC Berkeley
scm@pa.urel.berkeley.edu



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