[whatwg] Issues concerning the <base> element and xml:base

[L. David Baron]

On Saturday 2008-03-01 17:12 -0800, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> I'd propose that resolution is always done against the base in effect at 
> the time the URI is resolved. So changing the base would never trigger a 
> reload short of another action.

That means you'd need to define when every URI is resolved and how
long that result is cached.  That seems like a substantial amount of
specification and testing work.  It might interfere with lazy
evaluation as a performance optimization, although I suspect that's
not an issue for the main case since we already have to resolve all
anchors in order to do visited-link coloring.

It also breaks some invariants that are nice to maintain, like that
removing and reinserting content from a document should produce the
same result.  (I think this one may actually be important in
practice since authors sometimes use removal/reinsertion to work
around bugs handling dynamic changes.  Although we probably already
break it in a bunch of ways as well.)

-David

-- 
L. David Baron                                 http://dbaron.org/
Mozilla Corporation                       http://www.mozilla.com/