linking to CSS and JS files

[eluser]imdevin567[/eluser]
This is quite an elementary concept, but I'm new to CodeIgniter (and MVC in general) and I cannot for the life of me figure this out. I am using the templates library to create a skeleton template for the rest of my pages. I am having no problem loading the template from the controller, but my javascript and CSS files in my template are just not linking to the right place. I have tried placing the files in the view folder, outside of the application folder...and elsewhere. Firebug is telling me that the files cannot be found.

I did use mod_rewrite to make clean URLS--not sure if this makes a difference in linking to internal files...here is what I have.

Code:

<$cript src="&lt;?php echo base_url(); ?&gt;templates/responsive/plugins/vegas/jquery.vegas.js" type="text/javascript"></$cript>

Any reason why this file is not found?