<BASE ...>
| Usage Recommendation |
|---|
 use it |
HREF: default address for hypertext links | |
TARGET: default window for linked documents |
<BASE ...> tells the browser to pretend that the current page is located at some URL other than where the browser found it. Any
relative reference will be
calculated from the URL given by <BASE HREF="...">
instead of the actual URL. <BASE ...> goes in the <HEAD> section.
For example, consider a page whose URL is
http://www.idocs.com/tags/linking/baseexample.html, and the full code of the page is this:
| this code |
produces this |
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Example of the BASE Tag</TITLE>
<BASE HREF="http://www.magenta.com/hello.html">
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<A HREF="index.html">go home</A>
</BODY>
</HTML>
|
this page |
The <BASE ...> tag on this page tells the browser to pretend that the page is located
at
http://www.magenta.com/hello.html.
The link on the page makes a relative reference to
"index.html". Instead of calculating the full URL of the link as
http://www.idocs.com/tags/linking/index.html, the link is calculated as
http://www.magenta.com/index.html.
Generally it's best to avoid using <BASE ...>. It usually just restricts the ability to move a set of web pages from one location to another (say, from your computer where you are developing them to the server where they publicly reside). However,
<BASE ...> can come in handy in development situations where the
final version of the page will make relative references to
resources that aren't on the development machine.
| 
