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

[Jonas Sicking]

Anne van Kesteren wrote:
> On Thu, 31 May 2007 01:44:57 +0200, Jonas Sicking <jonas at sicking.cc> wrote:
>> I would be hesitant to drop support for multiple <base>s in firefox 
>> actually. Implementation wise it was very easy to implement, and it is 
>> known that many pages out there break, though the percentage is small, 
>> there are a lot of pages on the internet.
>>
>> It might be something we could restrict to quirks mode pages though, 
>> that's not a bad idea at all.
> 
> Please don't introduce more quirks mode nonsense. We have more than 
> enough already as it is.

I'm not saying that we should add it to the spec. I'm saying that 
firefox might be able to remove support for the weird <base> behavior in 
standards mode, while retaining it in quirks mode.

I dislike quirks mode stuff too, but any other choice isn't very pretty 
here either. I can see 3 possible solutions:

1. What we do now, i.e. support multiple <base> elements in both quirks
    and standards mode. If the spec will not support multiple <base> then
    this would make us non-compliant with the spec.

2. Not support multiple <base> elements in either quirks nor standards
    mode. This would break a lot of pages (36000 in hixies test) for
    no really good reason since very little code is needed to deal with
    it.

3. Only support multiple <base> elements in quirks mode but not standard
    mode.

Pick your poison.

/ Jonas