MudGuard, You are quite right, _blank is the correct reserved word to use as the window-name parameter. I'm getting sloppy. A conforming browser is supposed to simply ignore the erroneous parameter but IE 5.5 at least ignores the word "new" but honors the leading underscore and treats it as _blank.

Jeri, Your book is correct as far as it goes. The point I was trying to make is that the page one is hoping to find may not be in the current directory or one of its subdirectories. It may be in another branch of the directory tree and if the leading slash character is not coded, the server has no way to know that the requested page is really in another path. Sometimes relative addressing is appropriate and sometimes you need a fully qualified directory path. If you aren't sure which one you need, it's best to stick with the path that you copied from the supplied URL.

      - Mark