298023 - [quirks] location.href and base tag outside head show inconsistent behaviour

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: DOM: Core & HTML, defect)

Description

[Adam Jimenez]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511 Firefox/1.0.4
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511 Firefox/1.0.4

location.href appears to ignore the base command. IE works.

e.g.
<base href="http://www.test.com/test/">
<button type="button" onClick="location.href='test.html'">go</button>


Reproducible: Always

Actual Results:  
redirects using the url as the base

Expected Results:  
should have used the base from the base tag

Comment 1

[Peter van der Woude [:Peter6]]

Attachment: tescase

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.8b2) Gecko/20050617
Firefox/1.0+ ID:2005061707

WFM

Comment 2

[Jorge Villalobos [:jorgev] (he/him)]

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511
Firefox/1.0.4
WFM

Comment 3

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

wfm with Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.2; de-DE; rv:1.8b2) Gecko/20050617

verified

Comment 4

[Adam Jimenez]

Attachment: base outside head

Comment 5

[Adam Jimenez]

Problem occurs when base tag is outside head (see new test case). It is probably
not strict w3c to put a base tag outside the head. Altho it works for regular
links and works in IE.

Comment 6

[Frank Wein [:mcsmurf]]

From the html 4 spec:
When present, the BASE element must appear in the HEAD section of an HTML
document, before any element that refers to an external source. The path
information specified by the BASE element only affects URIs in the document
where the element appears.

Maybe the base tag for a href links only works here for compatibility reasons?
Anyway, the bug you see here is no bug (since the spec forbids the base tag
where you put it)...

Comment 7

[Adam Jimenez]

Even so, surely being consistent is important. I've found it convenient to use
multiple base tags in a document when I have multiple sets of links from
different sources.

Comment 8

[Aaron Slunt]

Attachment: testcase using quirks mode

Here we have no doctype, so it forces quirks mode.

This bug is present using quirks mode, as the provided testcase shows. I fully
understand why the base tag isn't parsed outside of the head tag when gecko is
in standards-compliance mode, but this shouldn't be happening IMO in quirks
mode.

Comment 9

[Frank Wein [:mcsmurf]]

Yes probably we should fix this, i talked to a developer, but one problem is
that this bug here probably cannot be solved easily.

Comment 10

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

We store the "base outside the head" on elements.  But there's no obvious way to tell what element some random snippet of script "belongs to" (if any).

I suspect we should just wontfix this.  This is not nearly common enough to be worth yet more quirks.

Comment 11

[Anne (:annevk)]

Would this have any impact on this bug: <http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/08/29/457667.aspx>. (Or perhaps on a new bug on not doing the quirks.)

Comment 12

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Ah, yes.  Excellent.

I don't think we should drop the quirk until a bit after IE ships, at least.  We don't really want to break existing working pages.

Comment 13

[Jonas Sicking (:sicking) No longer reading bugmail consistently]

I don't think we should drop the current way we handle <base> tags ever (or at least not in a very long time).

Our current implementation supports <base> quriks really well at a very low cost, and without all the issues described in that blog for IE. The issue filed in this bug is the first time i've ran into someone having issues with our base implementation.

So keeping our current code will keep developers and users happy, at a negligable cost for us. It might even drive a few IE users over to us once pages stop working for them :)