Static websites structures are incompatible with current IPFS-HTTP gateways

[castarco]

Hello,

because the URL structures used in the IPFS-HTTP gateways, many static websites can become "broken" when using relative paths in their links.

Even if we can manually fix the links in the browser address bar, manually fixing the CSS and JS links is very annoying.

I imagine possible "fixes":

• Making native the IPFS protocol in the most popular browsers.
• Adding code to the gateways to modify on-the-fly the served HTML files (this "feature" should have the option of being enabled and disabled).
• And other variations of the previous ideas.

[jbenet]

indeed

• Making native the IPFS protocol in the most popular browsers.

this is the right fix.

though i suspect many things hardcode domains and protocol identifiers too. it will be a mess, and frankly, website creators ought to be more conscious of what objects they pull, and from where. thankfully, this will be made really easy with IPFS (we'll have a "resolve links" tool that can walk files and convert /ipns/<name> links to their /ipfs/<path> targets, for use in build steps), but of course this doesn't solve the past.

if other people have more ideas, we're all ears :)

[castarco]

Maybe we can do a simple command line tool to "fix" the HTML files before publishing them through IPFS. It would be a workaround, but even being a workaround, it will be very useful to help people start using IPFS.

[jbenet]

Absolutely. please go for it! 👍 x 💯

[daviddias]

Hi @castarco! A lot on the DWeb has happened since this issue was created :) People are hosting a ton of Websites on IPFS and nowdays tools just as create-react-app, gatsby and hugo already handle properly relative URL linking so that websites don't get messed up.

Closing this issue for the sake of having our issue tracker groomed. However, if this is still of your interest we now we have a forum perfect for these type of discussions, you can check it out here https://discuss.ipfs.io. Happy DWeb Hacking!