CSS Background-Image Path Issues

Question

Hi,

In amongst my CSS I have the following:

#framecontentTop{
position: absolute;
top: 0;
left: 120px;
right: 0;
height: 100px;
overflow: hidden;
background-image: url(/Users/myname/Website Project/logo.jpg);
color: white;
}

Where the path to the image I want to use as the background-image is /Users/myname/Website Project/logo.jpg

However, when I put in my div with the ID framecontentTop, it doesn't show the image (or indeed anything) as the background. There are no other divs in the CSS to conflict with it, and when I set the background for framecontentTop to a colour or keep it as an image but put the URL as some random image online, it loads it fine. So I can only assume the problem is with how I have specified the path to the image - can anyone see what I have done wrong here?

Many thanks

Answer 1

You are using an absolute path that will always resolve to the same URL on your server. If that works when you put it in element A, but doesn't work in element B, chances are the problem is not with the URL, but another background or background-image setting interfering.

I would use Firebug's "Inspect Element" function to find out whether there is another background setting taking precedence.

URLs with spaces should always be in quotes by the way:

background-image: url("/Users/myname/Website Project/logo.jpg");

Answer 2

If you have any special characters, they should be escaped, or in the case of white-space, at least quoted, like this:

background-image: url("/Users/myname/Website Project/logo.jpg");

You can see the W3C Spec for the full requirements.

Some characters appearing in an unquoted URI, such as parentheses, commas, white space characters, single quotes (') and double quotes ("), must be escaped with a backslash so that the resulting URI value is a URI token: '(', ')', '\,'.