From what I've read, there doesn't seem to be any clear cut "Best Practice" route for publishing (deploying) a web site to a live server from a development machine.

Surely all this needs to have the links and images as relative locations. Images inserted from the image gallery are hard coded with this abosolute path, which means when you perform a publish, one of the final steps has to be a search and replace through the HtmlText table, swapping out the old host maching name in the URL with the new...

Firstly, am I right in my assumptions here?
Secondly, could we not just have the relative links introduced, or an option to use either? Another option could be to have the host name stored in some configuration, web.config for example, and reference this instead.

Thanks in anticipation for your thoughts and ideas.