[whatwg] <base> elements, again

Mon Jan 24 13:21:05 PST 2011

On Mon, Jan 24, 2011 at 10:33 AM, Boris Zbarsky <bzbarsky at mit.edu> wrote:
> On 1/24/11 11:23 AM, Henri Sivonen wrote:
>>>
>>> Why did/does this markup work in other UAs? Or does it not?
>>
>> According to the Chromium bugs about Unicenter, Unicenter doesn't work in
>> Opera or in WebKit-based browsers--only in Firefox and IE.
>
> Exciting.  :(
>
>> When <base target> follows the <a>, IE6 ignores the target, because IE6
>> honors the most recent <base>.
>
> That's the Gecko 1.9.2 and earlier behavior as well, right?
>
>> IE7 and later ignore <base> outside <head>, so a <base> following an <a>
>> gets ignored due to that reason.
>
> Right, and that breaks other sites, which is why we changed away from that
> behavior...
>
> I can't say I like the IE6/old-Gecko behavior, but it may be the most
> web-compatible.  :(

So how does IE7/8 deal with the sites which broke for us when we
didn't honor <base> outside <head>? (United.com, right?)

I'd really like to avoid going back to Gecko/IE6 behavior. It's bad
both for browsers and authors.

/ Jonas