Is using absolute paths for images/scripts a good idea?

Question

I have a website which I am updating the URLs for i.e. rewriting to be more SEO friendly. By doing this, it has broken a lot of the links to scripts/images on the various pages. The only way around this (from what I can tell) is to use the absolute path to the scripts/images on the pages.

Now unless I am mistaken (or missing something) this should be pretty safe to do? Anyone who knows anything about websites and/or web development would be able to work out directories to images/scripts by simply looking at the current URL and matching it up against the relative paths anyways.

I would like to know if there are any real reasons why this would be an issue.

Thanks.

Answer 1

There are no security implications, but it will make life harder for you if you ever move your site (e.g. to a different domain), since you'll have to update all URLs from http://www.example.com/media/mynicepicture.jpg to http://www.mynewexample.com/media/mynicepicture.jpg. If you use relative URLs, you don't need to update your URLs if/when you move domains.

Answer 2

There are absolutely no security implications for using absolute URIs instead of relative URIs.