I have such code lines on a custom server.

<p><img src="%static%/pages/xyz.gif" /> <span class="hide_title">Title</span> <span class="hide_pagen">Page 1</span></p>

When the custom Apache server delivers the page it (in this example the picture appears) gets showed correctly in the browser.

In the case, I run the code on my development environment the browser doesn't get the path. The browser is unable to resolve the %static% part in the URL path, which looks to be a placeholder for the real directory called static. I can mitigate the issue, thus I remove the percent sign.

I assume it is a kind of Apache functionality?