Django app links lose domain in Internet Explorer - django

Question

I have a Django-powered page running on Apache with mod_wsgi. It works just fine in Firefox. When I switch to Internet Explorer, however, none of my links work. They all drop the domain part of the link.
For example, in Firefox, if I mouse over one of my links, I see something like this:
http://mydomain.edu/pathtomystuff/linkpage/
and it works.
However, in Internet Explorer, the same link shows this when I mouse over it:
http:///pathtomystuff/linkpage/
and obviously doesn't work.
If I manually type the address in Internet Explorer, it works fine. It's just the links.
This is probably something obvious and boneheaded. Please forgive me :)
UPDATE
Well I did figure out something of a "solution". I had BASE href= {{request.path}} in my base html file (which all other pages in my site extend). In reviewing the source code shown by IE and Firefox, both were seeing BASE href= which means request.path was not being passed to my template. So I changed it to BASE href=mydomain.edu and it works in IE now.
This is not a great fix though because it takes away from the portability of the django app...

Answer 1

If you want to preserve portability (as well as maintainability), the easiest and most "djangonistic" way to proceed would be to use {% url %} tags in your templates.
Note that the {% url %} tag should be passed a view as 'argument', for example: {% url myApp.views.myView foo='bar' %} will use your urlconf to create the appropriate url that will point to the myApp view called myView, with the value 'bar' passed as the 'foo' arg.
Of course, you needn't have arguments in all your views, the foo='bar' part is purely optional (Please do note that you shouldn't specify the request argument)
The most common use would be to use a syntax such as:
MyLink
Basically what you're trying to do here is reinvent the url tag, it already exists, so use it! :)