A question/point of interest

Greetings!

When validating some of our pages which included the code <BASE
target="main"> I went through the W3C validator and passed with flying
colors.  However running the pages through a HomeSite validator pointed
out that BASE has href as a required attribute.  Checking the HTML 4
spec I find:

<!ELEMENT BASE - O EMPTY               -- document base URI -->
 <!ATTLIST BASE
   href        %URI;          #REQUIRED -- URI that acts as base URI --
   >

So my understanding of the situtation is that the validator is allowing
the href attribute to be(incorrectly) left out, and we really ought to
have code such as
<BASE href="http://www.emsl.pnl.gov:2080/homepage.html" target="main">,
for instance.  Or am I(and the HomeSite validator) misunderstanding the
#REQUIRED portion in the spec?

Replies to email(I'm not on the list) would be appreciated.

Thanks!

-GE