If you start the path out with a forward slash "/", you are instructing the browser to search from the root of this site.
Since browsers don't know about the concept of a
Servlet Webapp, they will build the URL by appending the domain to your path (without the contextPath)
Example:
If your gif is in:
http://www.mydomain.com/myWebApp/images/myimg.gif and you use the following src attribute:
/images/myimg.gif
The browser will look in:
http://www.mydomain.com/images/myimg.gif Note, the contextPath (myWebApp) is missing.
The best way to build these paths is to read the contextPath at runtime and create a URL that is relative to the contextPath:
This isn't particular to
Tomcat. It would be the same for any Servlet/JSP app so I'm going to move this to the Servlet forum for you.
-Ben