[whatwg] URL resolution of fragment urls in html5 webapps

[Igor Minar]

On Wed, Jul 10, 2013 at 10:24 AM, Alex Russell <slightlyoff at google.com>wrote:

> hey Igor,
>
> Was just discussing this with Rafael, and it seems like the core issue
> you're flagging is that if a document has a <base> element, all #anchor
> navigations (which would otherwise be document relative) are now full-page
> navigations to the URL specified in the <base>, not the document's
> "natural" URL. Is that right?
>

correct


>
> If so, we might be able give you some control over this in the Navigation
> Controller (although it's not currently scoped as many folks didn't want to
> contemplate in-document navigation for the time being).
>
> But perhaps we don't need to do that: is the current behavior the same
> across browsers? If it's not, we might be able to change the spec. If it
> is, it'll be harder.
>

As far as I can tell it is, because that the easiest thing to implement. It
sort of makes sense why - a relative anchor url is treated just as any
relative url and it is resolved as such. However, just as Rafael pointed
out, unlike path-relative urls, I can't think of a scenario where resolving
relative anchor urls against anything but "self" would be useful and
therefore I have a hard time thinking of an existing code that would take
advantage and rely on this kind of resolution.

In the ideal world, I'd love for the spec to say that
- all relative urls except for relative anchor urls should be resolved
against document.baseURI (which is tied to location.href unless base[href]
is set)
- relative anchor urls should always resolve against location.href

I think that this kind of behavior would make the url resolution work in
all common and currently used scenarios.

/i




>
> Regards
>
>
> On Wed, Jul 10, 2013 at 7:11 AM, Igor Minar <iminar at google.com> wrote:
>
>> The current url resolution as
>> described<
>> http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#resolving-urls>in
>>
>> the spec results in some unhelpful behavior when the following
>> combination of web technologies are used in a client-side web app:
>>
>> - a combination of path-relative urls (<a
>> href="relative/url/to/somewhere">link</a>) and fragment/anchor urls (<a
>> href="#anchorUrl">link</a>)
>> - history.pushState - used for deep-linking
>> - base[href] - used to properly resolve the relative urls to the root of
>> the application in various deployment environments
>>
>>
>> Once history.pushState is used to change location.href, the path-relative
>> urls resolve correctly as expected against the base[href], but anchor urls
>> that are only useful if resolved against the current document.baseURI also
>> unsurprisingly resolve against the base[href]. This behavior makes them
>> unsuitable for this kind of applications which is a big loss in developers
>> toolbox and in fact breaks existing web features like svg that depend on
>> anchor urls to reference nodes in the current document.
>>
>> Does anyone have thoughts on how one could build a client-side app that
>> can
>> be deployed in various contexts without any special server-side templating
>> or build-time pre-processing?
>>
>> The base element looks like a perfect solution for this, if only it didn't
>> break anchor urls.
>>
>
>