Slash (/) vs tilde slash (~/) in style sheet path

Question

ASP.NET offers two ways to specify paths for style sheets:

<link href="/common/black_theme/css/style.css" rel="stylesheet">   (this is working)
<link href="~/common/black_theme/css/style.css" rel="stylesheet">  (this is not working)

• How are these paths resolved?
• Why are the generated paths different?
• Which one should I pick in which case?

As per my knowledge, ~ represents the root directory of the application. "common" is the folder below the website root (named testsite.demo) in IIS.

Physical path: D:\Physicalpath\WarpFirstSite\testsite.demo
"common" folder: D:\Physicalpath\WarpFirstSite\testsite.demo\common

Honewort

Answer 1

• / - Site root
• ~/ - Root directory of the application

The difference is that if you site is:

http://example.com

And you have an application myapp on:

http://example.com/mydir/myapp

/ will return the root of the site (http://example.com),

~/ will return the root of the application (http://example.com/mydir/).

Individual

@Kyasa - What do you need explaining? – Individual

i am confused with appliation path . Is it physical path that site example.com mapped to ? – Honewort

@Kyasa - It is the IIS virtual application. See here - learn.iis.net/page.aspx/150/… – Individual

Nice link.So we can use ~ in link tag without runat=server tag? – Honewort

@Kyasa - No, this is a server side feature. – Individual

Hi Oded. The concept you explain is right. But it is working for image src , but not for importing stylesheet using Link tag.Unable to use tilde in link tag – Honewort

@Kyasa - Is it a server side element? – Individual

yes it is serverside < link href="~/Images/simple2.css" id="testcss" runat="server" type="text/css" /> and <img id="Img2" runat="server" src="~/Images/aaa.png" /> Both images and css are at same location. – Honewort

Answer 2

The second won't work because its not a recognised path by anything except asp.net code on the server side. And since your link tag is regular html and not a server control it never gets processed.

Bostick

Answer 3

If you add runat="server" in your link tag then it would works perfectly....

like this....

<link href="~/common/black_theme/css/style.css" rel="stylesheet" runat="server"> 

(this is also working)

Try

This don't work. I apply this solution, and the render code with folder of page, no with folder of web application. example: <link href="~/CSS/MyStyle.css" rel="StyleSheet" runat="server" /> result: localhost/AppFolder/OtherFolder/~/CSS/MyStyle.css Css folder is under AppFolder. – Dashed