I am trying to use < base> TAG to indicate the source folder containing the media files for my html pages located in separate folder.
I have the
<base href="../MEDIA_FOLDER"/>
Doesn't have a trailing slash, so it refers to a file called MEDIA_FOLDER
and not a folder. Often you don't notice the difference because web servers will redirect an attempt to fetch folder
to the proper address folder/
, which will then typically return a default document (eg. folder/index.html
). But for relative URL resolution it does make a difference.
target
relative to /folder
is not /folder/target
, it's just /target
. To make it /folder/target
you must let the browser know that the base URL is a folder, by adding a trailing slash:
<base href="../MEDIA_FOLDER/"/>
There is no reason for different browser behaviour here. A place you may find different browser behaviour, though, is if you've accidentally used a Windows-filesystem-style backslash \
instead of /
, so do check for that.
Is your base
element inside the body
element? That could cause the problem. (Check in Firebug, it might end up in the body
even if your code looks okay on first sight.)
Richard's answer got me close to the working solution, here is what I ended up adapting it to.
<!--[if IE]><script type="text/javascript">
// Fix for IE ignoring relative base tags.
(function() {
var baseTag = document.getElementsByTagName('base')[0];
baseTag.href = window.location.protocol + '//' + window.location.host + baseTag.href;
})();
</script><![endif]-->
This is definitely a very annoying bug in IE, but I just found a workaround.
The thing to realize is that IE does resolve the relative path, and then promptly ignores it. You can even see the fully resolved URL by checking the value of the base tag's 'href' property later on using JavaScript. So this (rather silly) piece of code resets the <base>
tag's 'href' attribute to the very full URL that IE had already resolved, thereby causing it to no longer be ignored.
Add the following HTML to the top of your page, right after the tag and before you actually use any URLs:
<!--[if IE]><script type="text/javascript">
// Fix for IE ignoring relative base tags.
(function() {
var baseTag = document.getElementsByTagName('base')[0];
baseTag.href = baseTag.href;
})();
</script><![endif]-->
(conditional comments necessary since this code can break the <base>
tag in Safari/Chrome, and other browsers clearly don't need it.)
Such a silly bug.
I consider that people reading this are dealing with enterprise or legacy web applications.
We can't rely on the IE Conditional Comments as it just might be ignored by IE, believe it or not. At least, it is my persisting case.
I added below my script which is browser features' agnostic.
It was tested in IE11 under IE-5-7-8-9-10-11 render modes with HTML5 <!DOCTYPE html>
.
With the IE Enterprise mode and without.
It works for relative paths like ../MEDIA_FOLDER/
.
It works for my_child_folder/MEDIA_FOLDER/
with the exception of IE7-5.
I'm a little lazy to fix it and encourage you to use rooted paths.
I.e. simply use /some_root_folder/my_child_folder/MEDIA_FOLDER/
instead of my_child_folder/MEDIA_FOLDER/
. (Or improve my script, or do not use IE7-5.)
We have two main bugs here and a bunch of cases.
First, IE9 and IE8 auto-convert a path value in the href attribute to an URL. They do this, just like all modern browsers.
But IE page doesn't see this auto-change. We just fix this by re-assining of the href baseTag.href = baseTag.href
.
Second, IE7-5 do not produce auto-conversion of a path value to an URL value. We should do it manually.
There are other situations which slightly change IE behavior. This depends on
<base/>
, <base></base>
or <base>
.For example if you have the IE Enterprise Mode set to IE8 with the Compatibility View set on then IE will set IE7 User-Agent HTTP header and ASP.NET Forms will be rendering for IE7.
Or the IE Conditional Comments will be ignored in case of pop-ups, frames, iframes or on common pages. These are all my real cases.
(function () {
// Fixes old IE wrong behaiors of the href attribute of the base tag.
var preventIeHrefIgnoring = function (baseTag) {
var docMode = document.documentMode;
var isIe = docMode;
if (!isIe)
return;
if (docMode != 8 && docMode != 9)
return;
// IE8 and IE9 auto-convert path-like values of the href attribute, but do not apply it on the page.
// It is fixed by re-assining.
baseTag.href = baseTag.href;
}
var baseColl = document.getElementsByTagName('base');
if (!baseColl.length)
return;
var baseTag = baseColl[0];
var initialHref = baseTag.href;
if (!initialHref)
return;
var hrefIsUrl = initialHref.indexOf("https://") == 0 || initialHref.indexOf("http://") == 0;
if (hrefIsUrl) {
preventIeHrefIgnoring(baseTag);
return;
}
// Below we are dealing with IE7-5 only.
var targetHref = initialHref.indexOf('/') == 0 ? initialHref : "/" + initialHref;
var resultHref = window.location.protocol + "//" + window.location.host + targetHref;
baseTag.href = resultHref;
})();
I'm not sure how BASE works with directory relative urls, try giving it a root relative url like
<base href="/MEDIA_FOLDER"/>