Name
<BASE> — NN all IE all HTML all
Synopsis
<BASE>
End Tag: Forbidden
A BASE
element is defined inside a
document’s HEAD
element to instruct the
browser about the URL path to the current document. This path is then
used as the basis for all relative URLs used to specify various
SRC
and HREF
attributes in the
document. The BASE
element’s URL should be a
complete URL, including the document name. The browser calculates the
base URL path to the directory holding that document. For example, if
you specify <BASE
HREF="http://www.megacorp.com/products/index.html">
,
the HREF
attribute of a link on that page to
widgets/framitz801.html resolves to the full URL
of
http://www.megacorp.com/products/widgets/framitz801.html.
Similarly, a relative URL can walk up the hierarchy with the dot
syntax. For example, from the BASE
element defined
earlier, an IMG
element in the
index.html page might be set for
SRC="../images/logo.jpg"
. That reference resolves
to http://www.megacorp.com/images/logo.jpg.
By and large, today’s browsers automatically calculate the base
URL of the currently loaded document, thus allowing use of relative
URLs without specifying a BASE
element. This is
especially helpful when you are developing pages locally and
don’t want to change the BASE
element
settings when you deploy the pages. The HTML 4.0 specification states
that a document lacking a BASE
element should by
default use the current document’s URL as the
BASE
URL. Of course, this is only for true web pages, rather ...
Get Dynamic HTML: The Definitive Reference now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.