Can someone explain the .. in html to me?

It tells the browser to look one directory up from where it is currently in the server's file structure. Let's say you have a page in About>People>Vince on a server, and you need to get a picture to display from img>Employees, where both About and img are in the same folder on the server. Your computer would request the page at About/People/Vince, and that page tells your computer that it can find the image at ../../../img/Employees/Vince.png. Your browser would go up one directory from where it is, and it would be in the People folder. It would then go up one more to About, then finally one more to the root of the server. It would then go down into img/Employees, and find the file Vince.png. It would load that file, then jump straight back to About/People/Vince. Does that make sense?

the ".." is part of a path to a file or folder. It means that the file is located one level higher in the folder hierarchy.

here's an example. let's say you have a page of your website here: /home/vince/website/blog/index.html

and you have an image which you want to add to that page stored here: /home/vince/website/profile_pic.jpg

note that the image is NOT in the "blog" folder, it is in the parent "website" folder. so if you want to add this image to the blog page, the RELATIVE path to that image seen from the blog page would be: ../profile_pic.jpg

EDIT: Michael was faster :o)

Help!--I still don't get this at all. I thought we put all images in the image folder and point to that? When we added the profile picture or the twitter/facebook logos isn't that what we did? Why are these contact icons any different. Thanks for your help....