[DAS2] hrefs and xml:base

[Ed Erwin]

The document you cite as defining xml:base leaves me with an unanswered 
question.  It says that this is inspired by the html <base> tag, but 
doesn't say whether it works in the same complex way that html <base> works.


Namely, with this base tag:
<BASE href="http://www.aviary.com/products/intro.html">

This href:
href="../cages/birds.gif"

resolves to:
http://www.aviary.com/cages/birds.gif


In other words, it doesn't simply do a String concatenation of the base 
and the href, but rather has to throw away the "intro.html" part and 
interpret the meaning of ".."

This example comes from
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/links.html#h-12.4


Is there some more complete specification of xml:base that states 
whether these complicated things are allowed?


Helt,Gregg wrote:
> If we want to fully adopt the xml:base standard (which I think we do),
> then my interpretation is that xml:base is lexically scoped and within
> its scope allows any attribute that requires a URI to be potentially
> specified as a relative URI (relative to the xml:base) instead of an
> absolute URI.  
> 
> So I would say "href", "doc_href", "id", and a number of other
> attributes should obey the xml:base directive(s).  Note that this
> doesn't preclude using an absolute URI for these values, it just also
> allows using a relative URI.
> 
> Here's a nice concise summary of xml:base :
> http://www.brics.dk/~amoeller/XML/common/xbase.html
>