relative url's can cause bad links

[SvenDowideit]

I am deploying to s3, and then have a hidden 404 error mkdocs page - when the users enters a long (incorrect url), then the error page is rendered using that url - thus all the menu links are broken.

[d0ugal]

FWIW, relative URLs have also caused a ton of issues with implementing #222.

I'm not really a fan of relative URLs, it is only really useful for people that view the docs in static mode and I'm not sure how popular a use case that is.

The only way I can think of solving this would be by having a config option - but I'm somewhat wary of this.

@SvenDowideit I assume you already use this approach in your forked version?

[lovelydinosaur]

Is there an example for this?

I use relative interlinking all the way through the REST framework docs. (Eg see links at the bottom of this document... https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tomchristie/django-rest-framework/master/docs/topics/rest-hypermedia-hateoas.md )

What doesn't work?

[d0ugal]

Consider for example the search index, it is generated once for all plages. However, if you display the results in a modal the links need to be relative (or they wont work in static mode). To make this work in #222 I had to do this bit of gross magic, I'm trying to come up with a better solution.

https://github.com/d0ugal/mkdocs/blob/search/mkdocs/themes/mkdocs/js/tipuesearch/tipuesearch_content.js
https://github.com/d0ugal/mkdocs/blob/search/mkdocs/themes/mkdocs/base.html#L65

[lovelydinosaur]

it is only really useful for people that view the docs in static mode

Maybe I'm just misunderstanding, but being able to click between docs in my editor is pretty neat.

Consider for example a search index

Are we just talking about relative links in the theme then? No problem from me with not supporting that.

[d0ugal]

Updated my comment as I rushed it on my phone. So yeah, I think for me the issue is supporting it at the theme level for me.

I think with @SvenDowideit's example you have a similar issue when the 404 could be rendered at /invalid-path/ or /invalid/path/ but I may be missunderstanding that.

[d0ugal]

It is worth noting that we don't have this issue with the DRF theme, but I'm not sure if that is specific to that theme. The menu works fine: http://www.django-rest-framework.org/testing/testing/testing/

[lovelydinosaur]

I'm still surprised tho - I've never used anything except relative links with MkDocs,
and put a stack of time into making them work initially.
Be helpful to see a broken example case.

[lovelydinosaur]

I'm further confused because this report seems to be competely at odds with #192

If you can't use relative or absolute URLs how are the rest of you folks getting by? :)

[d0ugal]

Hah, so I'd always use relative for document linking. I don't think absolute URLs work (although, with the strict mode disabled they may happen to work).

I chimed in as I've had issues with #222 but that is a specific theme case so I may have just confused things. Maybe Sven can clarify the original issue.

[lovelydinosaur]

we don't have this issue with the DRF theme

Yeah just noticed that the nav on the 404 page there is hardcoded in the theme :p

[SvenDowideit]

http://docs.docker.com/ is an example - we also publish a version of the same docs to http://docs.docker.com/v1.2/ etc

and at the same time, there are webserver based redirects that may display a page, but come from a totally different place in the url structure.

so for (a madeup) eg http://yoursite/one/two/three/index.html may also be shown when the user requests http://yoursite/other/place.index.html

so the relative link is going to be at the wrong place, and the wrong level.

I've obviously made a change in my fork for this... :)