URL rewrite breaks relative paths

Question

I recently spent days trying to get my .htaccess to rewrite URLs, of which I eventually prevailed. My typical URL is now rewritten from http://example.co.uk/pages/aboutMe/pages/aboutMe.php (don't ask) to http://example.co.uk/aboutMe , which I am very satisfied with.

But, as a result, my relative paths no longer work - I can no longer simply type ../images/email.png in the source code. Instead, I have to type the path in full - /pages/contact/images/email.png , which isn't good practise/convention, is very rigid (in that it's not flexible) and I can see this becoming very problematic in the future, if I ever decide to rename a folder, for example.

I realise that this is probably because it is referencing the current URL (not the original, unaltered one) and is getting confused as it is looking for a directory that doesn't exist. Is there a workaround for this? Or is this the price of having a neat URL?

Here are my RewriteRules:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f

# Remove www.
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.mythofechelon.co.uk$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://mythofechelon.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L]

# Rewrite /pages/filename/pages/filename.php to /fileName
RewriteRule ^home/?$ /pages/index/pages/index.php [L]
RewriteRule ^projectsPortfolio/?$ pages/projectsPortfolio/pages/projectsPortfolio.php [L]
RewriteRule ^projectsPortfolio-flash/?$ pages/projectsPortfolio/pages/projectsPortfolio-flash.php [L]
RewriteRule ^projectsPortfolio-code/?$ pages/projectsPortfolio/pages/projectsPortfolio-code.php [L]
RewriteRule ^aboutMe/?$ pages/aboutMe/pages/aboutMe.php [L]
RewriteRule ^contact/?$ pages/contact/pages/contact.php [L]

I had to manually rewrite the URL for each of my pages as I was told there was no pattern in my URLs. Anyway, try not to get sidetracked by that.

Answer 1

As far as I know, there is no workaround for that. Depending your rewrite rules, you might be able to create another set of rewrite rules for the image folder (for instance, rewriting "http://example.co.uk/images" to "http://example.co.uk/pages/contact/images").

That being said, when you start rewriting URL, I really don't think it's a bad practice to use absolute path for the images. Actually it's more robust, as you can freely change the way the URL are rewritten without breaking every relative paths.