<base href="SITENAME" /> = RELATIVE LINKS THAT WORK SITEWIDE

Wrote a simple howto to prevent having to rely on internal, sitewide absolute links. Only drawback is if you use subdomains and you want to preserve the subdomain path in the address bar. Really, really simple tip that saves alot of time in case need to preserve your relative links.

http://computing.adviceuniverse.com/...50822basehref/

-Eric

By default your server will always look at the root directory. (base href) Unless you tell it otherwise.
If your file is in /images then it will look in domain.com/images for the file. With or Without the base href!

Now if your page is in /images and your file is in /photo then it will look in its root directory for the file. Which in this case would be /images !

Most hints on the net say to use absolute paths when you link your style sheets and images on sub domains, but this will come to bite you if you have masked domain names or you change your domain name completely, leaving you having to update every single absolutely linked file on your website.

Even if you use the base href tag, when you change your domain name you still have to go back and change every base href tag on every page of your site. So where are you really saving time?

well for one, it saves a ton of time from having to type out full local urls while you are designing a site.

if you use templates that affect hundreds of pages, all you have to do is make the change in the template and the changes will be reflected in every page based on the template.

-Eric

How does it?

There is simply no need to put full local urls in the document. Using root relative or document relative paths is perfectly usable and all user agents will normalise the url before accessing the URI.

The only time the <base> could be set for a useful purpose is when there are several domains aliased to the one site and no server side redirection can be used.

Very well said chrishirst. That is the point I was trying to make. By adding the base href then there is a need to go and change something if you were to switch domains.