Beginning ASP.NET 3.5: In C# and VB

7.5. Summary

This chapter familiarized you with navigation in an ASP.NET web site. Users don't just type in the address of a web page directly, so it's important to offer them a clear and straightforward navigation system.

A critical foundation for a good navigation system is a good understanding of how URLs work. URLs come as two types: relative URLs and absolute URLs. Relative URLs have two subtypes: document relative and root relative. Document relative URLs point to another resource on the server relative to the document in which the URL is contained. This makes it easy to refer to other resources in the same folder without specifying a full path to it. This enables you to move a folder at the same level in the site without breaking links to other resources. The downside of relative URLs is that it's difficult to move folders to a different level, for example from the root to a subfolder. To overcome this problem, you can use root-based URLs that specify a path to a resource starting at the root of the site. Using ASP.NET's tilde (~) syntax to refer to the application root of the site makes this even easier.

Absolute URLs enable you to point to resources by their complete location, including protocol and domain information. Absolute URLs are mostly useful if you want to point to resources outside your own web site.

ASP.NET offers three navigation controls used in the user interface of a web site. These controls allow your users to visit the different pages in your site. The ...