Re: BASE interpretation

Roy T. Fielding (fielding@avron.ICS.UCI.EDU)
Wed, 12 Oct 1994 05:00:14 +0100

> How is BASE supposed to be interpreted ?
>
> I like the way Xmosaic does it - by replacing the current URL
> with that specified by the document. However, other people think
> it should just provide a way to resolve relative URLs.

Same thing -- once the document is retrieved, the URL is only used
for resolving embedded relative URLs.

> One beta
> client even allows multiple BASEs to be present in any part of the document.

That is a bug.

> The HTML 3 spec is ambiguous (to me anyhow), as to how BASE is to
> be interpreted.

At most one BASE is allowed, and it can only appear within the HEAD part
of the document. No ambiguity there, though the spec referred to should
be HTML 2.0.

These and other issues are documented in the Internet-Draft at

http://www.ics.uci.edu/WWWdocs/papers/draft-ietf-uri-relative-url-00.txt

.....Roy Fielding ICS Grad Student, University of California, Irvine USA
<fielding@ics.uci.edu>
<URL:http://www.ics.uci.edu/dir/grad/Software/fielding>