Re: What BASE means

Daniel W. Connolly (connolly@beach.w3.org)
Thu, 3 Aug 95 15:37:14 EDT

In message <m0se3zc-0002zSC@giant.mindlink.net>, Tim Bray writes:
> I had always thought the main utility
>of BASE was to help people like us fight the otherwise-intractable
>problem of URL aliasing.

BASE is a hack, really. It's somewhat unfortunate that it ended up
in HTML at all. If you're using HTTP, you don't need it at all.
Just use the URI header:

http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/Protocols/HTTP1.0/HTTP1.0-ID_30.html
|7.1.13 URI
|
|The URI-header field may contain one or more Universal Resource
|Identifiers (URIs) by which the resource origin of the entity can be
|identified. ...

In fact, much like the charset= issue, I'd like to see more use of
RFC822 message headers in HTML files. I like the idea of a ".msg"
convention, ala:

foo.msg contains
Content-Type: text/html; charset=x-shift-jis
URI: http://www.foo.com/my/favorite/doc/

<!doctype html public "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
<title>...</title>
...

Dan