Why does clicking links on my site not change the URL in the browser's address bar?

Question

I expect this is a basic question but I'm not sure what to search for in order to get the answer...

I'm hosting a site using Apache 2.2 (on Mac OS X 10.6) and I use a Directory and an Alias directive in httpd.conf to serve a set of pages outside Apache's DocumentRoot. The URL looks like this to the user:

http://mysite/root

I have it set to automatically serve index.html if you don't specify a file so in fact that is serving:

http://mysite/root/index.html

On that index page I have links to other files in the same directory (e.g. about.html) in the filesystem. If I click one it loads the page fine. The thing I'm trying to figure out is why the URL in the browser's address bar doesn't change when I do that. In other words the address bar doesn't look like this:

http://mysite/root/about.html

Why is that? I assume this is some default that Apache uses? Can I set it so that it does show the actual file name in the address? At the moment it still shows:

http://mysite/root

which is annoying as when I refresh the page in my browser it serves me index.html again!

Answer 1

Sounds like this is not an Apache issue, but like your index.html is using HTML frames. So, to get rid of this behavior, you'll have to get rid of the frames.

Update, as this is your DNS provider adding those frames:

If you have a fixed public IP address, then any normal DNS provider allows you to map your domain to some specific IP address, instead of using some magical frameset. Your DNS provider seems to offer this as well.