For technophiles,
mumblefratz.info was my first experience with using "masking" as offered by GoDaddy. This feature causes the address bar in your browser to display http://mumblefratz.info/ - http://mumblefratz.info/ regardless what page you are actually viewing. By looking only at the address bar, you would not know that you were actually on http://www.mastermason.com/mumblefratz/default.htm - http://www.mastermason.com/mumblefratz/default.htm , http://www.mastermason.com/default.htm - http://www.mastermason.com/mumblefratz/page2.htm - http://www.mastermason.com/mumblefratz/page2.htm or http://www.mastermason.com/mumblefratz/page3.htm - http://www.mastermason.com/mumblefratz/page3.htm . The address bar continues to display http://mumblefratz.info/ - http://mumblefratz.info/ regardless.
It appears to me, that this is accomplished using the following technical ruse.
- The vistor's browser requests a page;
- when using masking, GoDaddy receives the page request then makes a call for that page to your site on Mastermason.com;
- Mastermason.com responds with the requested page to GoDaddy;
- GoDaddy places the resonse in a new page consisting of a single frame containing the Mastermason.com delivered content; and then
- forwards this framed page to the requesting browser.
- The thus constructed framed page always appears to be http://mumblefratz.info/ - http://mumblefratz.info/ to the visitor's browser.
In my opinion, the only reason to use Masking is to try and hide the underlying hosting service from the site visitor. The behavior described above at least partially accomplishes that, however, if you mouseover an internal relative link, the Status Bar displays the address as http://www.mastermason.com/mumblefratz/page2.htm - http://www.mastermason.com/mumblefratz/page2.htm , etc.
Oops.
The three pages of mumblefratz.info help me illustrate this behavior.
On page 1, the Next> is a relative link to "page2.htm". On a mouseover, it displays " http://www.mastermason.com/mumblefratz/page2.htm - http://www.mastermason.com/mumblefratz/page2.htm " which is correct but not desired.
On page 2, both navigation links are fully qualified URLs, and the full URL displays on a mouseover. <Previous links to http://www.mastermason.com/mumblefratz/default.htm - http://www.mastermason.com/mumblefratz/default.htm which is the home page; Next> links to http://mumblefratz.info/page3.htm - http://mumblefratz.info/page3.htm . This is how you would like the URL to appear, I believe.
On page 3, I placed a "Base" html statement in the Head section and used a relative link to "page2.htm". On mouseover, this displays " http://mumblefratz.info/page2.htm - http://mumblefratz.info/page2.htm " as the URL, which is the format desired. So this may be a possibility. However, it seemed to break my image link and I had to enter it as a fully qualified URL to make the image display correctly.
The HTML source for the "Base" statement that I used on page 3 was as follows.
<base href=" http://mumblefratez.info/page3.htm - http://mumblefratez.info/page3.htm ">
Based on this testing, it appears that there are two solutions that will work.
1. Change your internal relative links to fully qualified URLs in the form of " http://mumblefratz.info/xxx - http://mumblefratz.info/xxx " where xxx equals your current relative link; or
2. Add the Base statement to the Head section on each page (hopefully this doesn't break other internal links, like my image problem).
Your choice, but I think I would prefer option #1 if it were me.
In my opinion, if you don't really, really need masking, then don't use. It adds overhead making your site appear to be slower. It takes extra effort to fully cloak the underlying server, and this effort gets repeated should you ever move your web site.
A vanity domain name, like mumblefratz.info, makes it easy for your visitors to access your site. Do you really care that they know that the underlying hosting service is http://www.mastermason.com/mumblefratz - www.mastermason.com/mumblefratz ?
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dgresh
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