The initial forward slash ( / ) instructs the browser to look for a directory named mysite that is off of the root directory. If you were to insert this reference into a page on your Windows system, your browser would interpret the first forward slash as C:\, and would look for the mysite/ directory, which would contain the index.html file. If this page were on a Web server, the link would refer to the Web server's root directory (e.g., /var/www/mysite/ in Linux/UNIX or C:\inetpub\wwwroot\ in Windows).