HTML base tag

[bertrand-caron]

Hi,

I have not yet come up with a test for it, but I have the feeling html-proofer does not implement the HTML base tag.

I myself only discovered the existence of the tag recently, which is really useful for not hardcoding too much in your site's URL.

Do you want to comment on that ?

Cheers, B.

[gjtorikian]

Wow, that's new to me too. No, Proofer doesn't handle this yet...but it should.

[doktorbro]

The base tag is not widely used. Bertrand, can you provide a public website made by you with the base tag?

[bertrand-caron]

Hi Anatole,

I am using for a corporate website that I would not like to advertise here, but basically any website that is sitting in a subdirectory could use the <base> tag to avoid hardcodding this subdirectory path anywhere else than on the base tag.

For instance if you are building a blog on your domain name 'http://hello.me/blog/2010-03-10-my-blog-post.html', I think you are better off setting <base href='http://hello.me/blog/'> and referencing your links as <a href='2010-03-10-my-blog-post.htm'.

Am I making sense ?

Regardless of that, shouldn't the fact that it exists in the standard be enough to make its implementation worthwhile ?

PS : Of course, I would have used subdomains if I could.

[doktorbro]

@bertrand-caron Do you know another corporate website which uses the base tag?

The base tag is not popular because it’s prepended to every relative link. If for example my assets sit in the uploads top-level directory, the base tag is not really helpful.

Regardless of that, shouldn't the fact that it exists in the standard be enough to make its implementation worthwhile ?

Not necessarily. Proofer is not an academic project, it focuses on real-world issues.

[lurch]

Do you know another corporate website which uses the base tag?

We use the base tag on e.g. http://www.interballoon.com/cgi-bin/order.pl and http://www.interrose.co.uk/flowers/20_pink_freesias.shtml as it allows us to keep using relative links to the files in the root directory, even though the current page is being served from a subdirectory. It means the page in the subdirectory doesn't have to get cluttered with '../' everywhere.