What are the recommendations for html <base> tag?

Question

I\'ve never seen HTML tag actually used anywhere before. Are there pitfalls to its use that means I should avoid it?

The fact that I have never noticed

Answer 1

In the case of SVG images inlined in the page there is another important issue that arises when the base tag is used:

Since with the base tag (as noted above already) you effectively loose the ability to use relative hash URLs like in

because they will be resolved against the base URL rather than the current document's location and thus are not relative anymore. So you will have to add the path of the current document to these kinds of links like in

So one of the seemingly positive aspects of the base tag (which is to move the long URL prefixes away from the anchor tag and get nicer, shorter anchors) completely backfires for local hash URLs.

This is especially annoying when inlining SVG in your page, be it static SVG or dynamically generated SVG because in SVG there can be a lot of such references and they will all break as soon as a base tag is used, on most, but not all user agent implementations (Chrome at least still works in these scenarios at the time of writing).

If you are using a templating system or another tool-chain that processes/generates your pages, I would always try to get rid of the base tag, because as I see it, it brings more problems to the table than it solves.