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I want to use the <base> tag for my links. Unfortunatly browsers don't seem to accept relative URLs in the href attribute:
<base href="../" />
I don't want to specify an absolute URL as the page will not always be in the same location. Any way to accomplish the effect with a relative URL?
Thanks in advance
what does the base tag do
The base tag sets the URL to which all relative URLs in the page relates.
Example
Would make the stylesheet beCode:<html>
<head>
<base href="http://www.vbforums.com/" />
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="styles/someone.css" charset="UTF-8" />
...
http://www.vbforums.com/styles/someone.css
no matter where the page is located.
What I want is to set a relative URL so that in a directory tree like this:
that I can reference the stylesheet in styles likeCode:/webroot/subdir
/webroot/subdir/styles
/webroot/subdir/styles/tutorial
/webroot/subdir/tutorial
styles/basic.css
no matter where in the directory the html file actually resides, just by adjusting the base tag.
Here are the problems:
1) I can't place the whole thing in the webroot. There is always one or more subdirs which might even change name.
2) The files are now on my local server, but I will later upload them somewhere else.
Because of 1 I cannot use
/styles/basic.css
and because of 2 I cannot use an absolute URL for the href in the base tag.
According to the HTML spec:
(emphasis mine)Quote:
This attribute specifies an absolute URI that acts as the base URI for resolving relative URIs.
xml:base doesn't seem to have such a restriction, but xml-base probably only works with XLink...
I think your best option is to use an absolute base url, and simply replace-in-all-files when you move the site. Or, you just have to type ../ every time.
xml:base either only works with xlink or xinclude or it is simply not supported by Moz.
I knew about that bit of the spec, I'm looking for some alternative.
I don't think there is another alternative.
The only other thing I can think of is an xsl stylesheet that adds ../ to all relative urls.