Is the HTML <base> tag also honored by scripting and CSS?

Question

The base HTML element provides a base for relative URIs in the HTML. Must JavaScript and CSS also honor it for relative URIs issued in them:

E.g.

JavaScrip

Answer 1

The base tag is indeed only honoured by the relative links inside the HTML document itself.

There's however an IE6-specific bug which you really need to take into account when using tag in HTML (not in XHTML). The tag is in HTML documented as not having an end tag , but IE6 incorrectly assumed it for true which will cause that the entire content after the tag is placed as child of the tag in its HTML DOM tree. This can cause at first sight unexplainable problems in Javascript/jQuery/CSS, i.e. the elements being completely unreachable in specific selections (e.g. html>body) until you discover that there's actually a base in between.

A normal IE6 fix is using conditional comments to include the end tag: