What are the recommendations for html <base>

Question

I've never seen <base> HTML tag actually used anywhere before. Are there pitfalls to its use that means I should avoid it?

The fact that I have never noticed it in use on a modern production site (or any site) makes me leery of it, though it seems like it might have useful applications for simplifying links on my site.

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Edit

After using the base tag for a few weeks, I did end up finding some major gotchas with using the base tag that make it much less desirable than it first appeared. Essentially, the changes to href='#topic' and href='' under the base tag are very incompatible with their default behavior, and this change from the default behavior could easily make third party libraries outside of your control very unreliable in unexpected ways, since they will logically depend on the default behavior. Often the changes are subtle and lead to not-immediately-obvious problems when dealing with a large codebase. I have since created an answer detailing the issues that I experienced below. So test the link results for yourself before you commit to a widespread deployment of <base>, is my new advice!

Answer 1

Well, wait a minute. I don't think the base tag deserves this bad reputation.

The nice thing about the base tag is that it enables you to do complex URL rewrites with less hassle.

Here's an example. You decide to move http://example.com/product/category/thisproduct to http://example.com/product/thisproduct. You change your .htaccess file to rewrite the first URL to the second URL.

With the base tag in place, you do your .htaccess rewrite and that's it. No problem. But without the base tag, all of your relative links will break.

URL rewrites are often necessary, because tweaking them can help your site's architecture and search engine visibility. True, you'll need workarounds for the "#" and '' problems that folks mentioned. But the base tag deserves a place in the toolkit.

Answer 2

I've never really seen a point in using it. Provides very little advantage, and might even make things harder to use.

Unless you happen to have hundreds or thousands of links, all to the same sub-directory. Then it might save you a few bytes of bandwidth.

As an afterthought, I seem to recall there being some problem with the tag in IE6. You could place them anywhere in the body, redirecting different portions of the site to different locations. This was fixed in IE7, which broke a lot of sites.

Answer 3

have also a site where base - tag is used, and the problem described occured. ( after upgrading jquery ), was able to fix it by having tab urls like this:

<li><a href="{$smarty.server.REQUEST_URI}#tab_1"></li>

this makes them "local"

references i used:

http://bugs.jqueryui.com/ticket/7822 http://htmlhelp.com/reference/html40/head/base.html http://tjvantoll.com/2013/02/17/using-jquery-ui-tabs-with-the-base-tag/

Answer 4

It makes pages easier for offline viewing; you can put the fully qualified URL in the base tag and then your remote resources will load properly.