Do we need the restrictions on the <base> element?

• From: Henrik Dvergsdal <henrik.dvergsdal@hibo.no>
• Date: Tue, 29 May 2007 11:55:04 +0200
• To: public-html@w3.org
• Message-Id: <420A196C-BA29-4691-AEEA-BBDBA6E204FF@hibo.no>

In HTML and the current version of HTML5 documents can only have one  
<base> element. In HTML5 his must occur "in a head element, after the  
meta element with the charset attribute, if any, but before any other  
elements" (http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/ 
multipage/section-document.html#the-base).

I wonder if this restriction is really necessary. Why not deprecate  
<base> and replace it with a "base" attribute that sets the base for  
an element and all its children? Could even be cascading in the sense  
that it could be possible to specify the base of a child relative to  
the parent base.

Typical use case:

Hand coded page with a download section in which one needs to change  
the download directory frequently due to versioning:

<div base="downloads/ver290507/">
..
</div>

--
Henrik Dvergsdal

Received on Tuesday, 29 May 2007 09:55:15 UTC