How to change directory but keep same page url as simple HTML?

Question

Inside a very simple HTML-only website, how to make this happen :

On a page Mysite.com/ABC/mypage.html

Action ; visitor clic on a link, goes to

Mysite.com/XYZ/mypage.html

So with an easy text link like <a href=""></a>, change the actual pages's previous directory only ?

Could be good easy solution for easy language switch

What do you mean by “keep same page url as simple HTML?” If you keep the same URL, you would be linking to the page itself, so you must means something else. There is a large number of ways that the question could be interpreted. — Jukka K. Korpela, Apr 20 '17 at 03:48

Kamyar Infinity · Answer 1 · 2017-04-20T00:16:14.637

0

You can do this:

<a href="../XYZ/mypage.html">

You can change your file name to index.html, or anything else that you set for the default page names in your web browser and you could simply do:

<a href="../XYZ/">

edited Apr 20 '17 at 00:16

answered Apr 20 '17 at 00:07

Kamyar Infinity

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Thanks both of you. Any way not to write the "mypage.html" part since it will keep the same name ? And would allow to use in a repeated header, so only changing the dirctory to Maybe not doable in full HTMl then? Would using PHP do it then ? Precisions, the site is set up as this "Mysite.com/Language/Mypage.html" and the page name is using same name for any language, so, only "/Language/" is changing. – revv86 Apr 20 '17 at 00:14
@revv86 See my edit! You can use default file names for that purpose. – Kamyar Infinity Apr 20 '17 at 00:16
I have test your solution above. I still don't see how to make this one code work an any page (as using this in a repeated header - not doing it manually) – revv86 Apr 20 '17 at 00:23
@revv86 If you arrange your files as this: `/english/index.html`, `/french/index.html`,... then you can write your links as `` and `` without writing the file name. So, if you can change the file names from `mypage.html` to `index.html`, this should be doable for all of your languages. – Kamyar Infinity Apr 20 '17 at 00:27
Got it. But I have more than one page inside a directory, so not doable, it would have to work for all 20 pages existing inside all directories ;-) – revv86 Apr 20 '17 at 00:33
@revv86 You can use a rewrite rule on the webserver, Nginx or Apache, if you have access to that. Otherwise, the only option I can think of is doing this for each file: For your file `/english/mypage.html`, create a directory `/english/mypage` and rename the file to `index.html` and move it there. You will create a lot of directories, but if you don't have access to the webserver, that's a way to overcome that! – Kamyar Infinity Apr 20 '17 at 00:36
Ok. Any other way if all webpages would be .php instead of being .html ? Any PHP rules/codes to get this done ? – revv86 Apr 20 '17 at 00:40
@revv86 If you're on Apache, you can create a `.htaccess` file and then you can do the rerouting either in that file or php. Take a look at this question [here](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16388959/url-rewriting-with-php). – Kamyar Infinity Apr 20 '17 at 00:44

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 20 '17 at 00:08

Is this what you are looking for?

<a href="/XYZ/mypage.html">Text</a>

This is because URLs which start with a forward-slash (/) are called 'absolute paths', and refer to the root, i.e. relative to mysite.com

Alternatively, if you want to affect the next directory up only, you can use the following:

<a href="../XYZ/mypage.html">Text</a>

This is because .. refers to the parent directory. So if you had a page at example.com/folder1/ABC/mypage.html and you wanted that page to link to example.com/newpages/XYZ/mypage.html, you could do:

<a href="../../newpages/XYZ/mypage.html">Text</a>

There are lots of examples and tutorials online, e.g. https://www.w3.org/TR/WD-html40-970917/htmlweb.html

Jeffhowcodes · Answer 3 · 2017-04-20T19:12:51.757

For HTML-only, I believe Kamyar Infinity's comments regarding rewrite rules are your best bet. However, if you're considering using PHP, this might do the trick. It will print the current file name to the after of the desired directory:

 <a href="/xzy/<?php echo basename($_SERVER['PHP_SELF']); ?>">text</a>

Alternatively we can use javascript to manipulate the href for this link (without using PHP at all):

<a href="/xyz/">text</a>

<script>
  //Get current Pagename
  var currentPage = location.pathname.substring(location.pathname.lastIndexOf("/") + 1);

  //Change href for link
  document.querySelector('a[href="/xyz/"]').setAttribute('href', '/xyz/'+ currentPage);
</script>

How to change directory but keep same page url as simple HTML?

3 Answers3