- From: Klaus Johannes Rusch <KlausRusch@atmedia.net>
- Date: Tue, 15 Jan 2002 23:20:23 CET
- To: html-tidy@w3.org
In <200201152049.JAA153569@atlas.otago.ac.nz>, "Richard A. O'Keefe" <ok@atlas.otago.ac.nz> writes: > I wrote: > > Also, what should I do to make Tidy complain if a page > > + does contain relative URIs, > > - does NOT have a <base> element in the <head>? > > HTML Tidy does not confine itself to tidying up HTML. > It *also* probides accessibility tips. Relative vs. absolute URLs, or the presence of a <base> element, have nothing to do with accessibility or preventing broken links from failing. Quite on the contrary, the <base> element is usually a bad idea because it limits the portability of a page: * Moving the page to another site (even from a development server to a production server) or just another directory breaks all links. * A page with an http:// base does not display properly using https:// > It is also a collection of links that haven't broken YET (so a link > checker probably wouldn't notice any problem), but are just waiting > for a chance to happen, and that's a usability problem. Absolute links break as often as relative links -- if the content goes away it does not make a difference if you referenced it as ../greatoffer.html or http://www.domain.com/greatoffer.html. > It's the kind of thing Tidy *could* detect quite easily, > and it's very much in the spirit of things that Tidy *does* detect > and warn about. No -- Tidy detects problems in and corrects the structure of markup, not the content. Besides there is no way to tell from a file where it will be hosted. > Note that I did not ask for Tidy to report this as a fatal error, > or to change the resulting HTML in any way, simply that I'd like it to > "complain", meaning to write a warning message (if the user requested it). If you want to enforce a certain style you could validate against a custom DTD requiring a <base> element, or for attribute values against an XML schema which only allows absolute protocols. There is nothing to complain about relative URLs or lack of <base> elements. -- Klaus Johannes Rusch KlausRusch@atmedia.net http://www.atmedia.net/KlausRusch/
Received on Tuesday, 15 January 2002 17:28:11 UTC