&lt;base&gt; tag breaks anchors

<base> tag breaks anchors

sneakyimp

I have been working on some mod_rewrite stuff which rewrites my ugly urls into nice SEO-friendly ones. Because the directory structure of the rewritten urls is different than the dir structure on my server, my images (and CSS and Javascript) were broken.

I fixed the image/css/javascript breaking problem by using a <base> tag:

<base href="http://mydomain.com/dir1/didr2/dir3/" />

The problem is that now my anchors are broken. A link like this:

<a href="#anchor">link to anchor</a>

Is now broken. Instead of linking to an anchor within the current file, (let's call it foo.php) it tries to link to http://mydomain.com/dir1/didr2/dir3/#anchor which would refer to index.html or index.php if any such file existed. If I put in the full path to http://mydomain.com/dir1/didr2/dir3/foo.php then clicking one of these links re-loads the current page rather than just jumping to the anchor.

Is there any way to fix this problem?

Desdinova

The trick is to not make the url change. so if you're on /this/that/whatever.php your # should be /this/that/whatever.php#youranchor

But on the other side, in my experience the base tag is very extremely and utterly irreliable cross-browser for CSS, Image and anchor usage.. so make sure you really want to use that.

bradgrafelman

Instead of using a <base> tag, why not rewrite the CSS and JS tags to use absolute paths?

sneakyimp

Just rewriting css and js tags and removing base tag would leave all the images broken. all told, there are HUNDREDS of these items. It's an enormous task. Additionally, the development directory is a subdirectory of the webroot. When a development scrum is over, files are published from the dev subfolder to the parent folder. This was the original motivation for the relative file references. It could be solved by using a var or constant in front of every single image, css, and js file, but this results in very nasty looking code.

I have managed to get the problem solved by using a relative path to the current document in the anchor tags:

<a href="some/file/fragment/file.php#anchor">LINK</a>

If I use a relative file reference, it doesn't force the page to reload. bizarre.