note 40934 deleted from function.dirname by danbrown

Note Submitter: zippy wonder idiot at yahoo dot com ---- Andrew, There are certainly good reasons to use relative includes, though I agree they usually should not be used exclusively. Here's a couple of common situations: 1) You do not have control over the web server on which you're developing. If you want your pages to work even if your {ISP,employer,friend,etc.} rearranges their server -- particularly Apache's user_dir -- then relative includes are the way to go. Your pages will work if they're at "http://www.host.tld/~user/", "http://host.tld/user/", or even "http://user.host.tld/". 2) You are developing a script or set of scripts for distribution. You don't want to force your users to rearrange their web server to allow includes from /includes/my-files before they can use your script, after all. On my own server, for example, I keep all site-wide PHP and JavaScript in /scripts so that I don't have to worry about where they're being called from. The include files used by my media library, however, are in a scripts subdirectory of the folder the main script runs in. This also makes development easier; the development and production versions simply reside in different folders, allowing them to use different versions of the include files without altering the include statements.