[whatwg] Document's base URI should use the document's *current* address

[Sean Hogan]

On 20/02/12 2:35 PM, Sean Hogan wrote:
> On 16/02/12 5:03 PM, Justin Lebar wrote:
>> On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 5:31 PM, Ian Hickson<ian at hixie.ch>  wrote:
>>> On Wed, 15 Feb 2012, Justin Lebar wrote:
>>>>>   - It sets "the document's current address" to ".../page.html#foo".
>>>> Well, this is pretty bad.  document.location is the document's current
>>>> address [1].  So clicking #foo changed document.location from 
>>>> page2.html
>>>> to page.html#foo, which I certainly wouldn't expect (and does not 
>>>> match
>>>> implementations).
>>> Seems to me we should change the implementations then. There isn't any
>>> fundamental difference between linking to #foo and linking to
>>> page.html#foo if the base URL is page.html, as far as I can tell.
>>>
>>> If the implementations can't change, then I'll change the spec, but it
>>> really seems bad to me that relative URLs will break depending on when
>>> they are resolved relative to pushState() changes.
>> When I implemented pushState, I explicitly didn't want authors to have
>> to rewrite all their anchor links after they changed the document's
>> current URI.
>>
>> > From an author's point of view, there's no such thing as the
>> document's original URI and, unless you're a nerd, you've never heard
>> of the base URI.  There's just the document's URI, modified by
>> pushState.
>>
>> > From this point of view, I'd say it's less surprising that relative
>> URIs would break when you change directories (hey, you *asked* for it)
>> than that anchor refs would update the browser's address bar and
>> document.location relative to the old URI.
>
> I share your perspective, Justin (if I'm interpreting it correctly).
>

<snip>
> By the way, this doesn't quite match what is currently implemented in 
> Firefox and Webkit. According to my testing, although the baseURI 
> after pushState() is the same as the documentURI (so far I've tested 
> <img>, <link> and <a> elts) the actual images and stylesheets used for 
> rendering aren't updated by the pushState() - they should be updated 
> if @src, @href is a rel path. If they were updated then the ones 
> relying on rel paths would often break, which I consider a good 
> behavior - an obvious visual cue to the page author, etc that 
> something was implemented wrongly.
>
> Sean
>
>

I've just realized that Firefox's behavior matches the spec for dynamic 
changes to base URLs,
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/urls.html#dynamic-changes-to-base-urls

Personally I think that facilitates broken behavior, but it's not 
significant as the issue of this thread.

Sean