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

Jonas Sicking jonas at sicking.cc
Sat Mar 1 20:14:42 PST 2008


Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> 
> On Mar 1, 2008, at 6:18 PM, L. David Baron wrote:
> 
>> On Saturday 2008-03-01 17:08 -0800, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
>>> How about requiring that the base used is the one in effect when a given
>>> relative URI is resolved, and define that URIs for resource-loading
>>> elements are resolved at the time the relevant attribute is set or 
>>> parsed
>>> (but for hyperlinks, at the time it is dereferenced). That is easy to
>>
>> That would make whether :link or :visited matches not correspond to
>> what you get when you click on the link, which seems pretty bad.
>> Hyperlinks already need to be resolved eagerly to style links
>> properly.
> 
> Dynamically changing <base> is a highly unlikely edge case anyway. If 
> behavior for this case really needs to be specified in detail, then I 
> think efficient and readily implementable behavior in the common case is 
> more important than getting this relatively small detail right for the 
> hypothetical page that changes <base>. Note that there are already ways 
> to make :link or :visited not match what the link actually does, via 
> event handlers.

I very much agree it's an edge case and would be fine with leaving it 
undefined.

/ Jonas



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