The <base> tag's "href" attribute

[zneak]

Hello everyone,

I was using the <base> tag on a project of mine for rather complex purposes, and I found out my code didn't work with Firefox. After a lot of testing, I found out that Firefox cannot handle relative paths in the href attribute of <base>, because the standard says so.

What's the rationale behind this? To me, it's downright idiotic.

[zcorpan]

HTML5 allows relative URLs in <base>. You could file a bug report against Mozilla if there's no open bug on it already.

[zneak]

Is that true? The current editor's draft says:

href = URI
The base URL for the document.

And from what I understand (I'm never quite sure about this part), what they describe there is necessarily absolute (as in scheme://stuff).

[zcorpan]

The draft you're reading is non-normative.

http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/cu ... -base-href

(You have to follow the cross-references to get to what is really allowed as the value, but it boils down to that relative URLs are allowed.)