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unexpect base tag behaviour
Posted on 2000-05-10
I have a CGI that reads an HTML file (freqently not written inhouse) up to the browser via stdout. The problem is that for the resulting page a BASE is being set to the path of the cgi that's generating the display. This is causing links on the resulting page to no longer work.
Basically...
page 1 - has links of general form "cginame?inputArgs_out.htm
this results in out.htm being written to the browser over stdout.
out.htm can have relative locations in it (both links, and graphics). I need for these hrefs and img tags to work.
I'd like to avoid having to read all the links and insert the appropriate base in them (i.e. find <a href='2nd.htm'> and change it to <a href='www.dummy.com/2nd.htm'>.
Is there a way to do this?
As an aside, if I do a view source in Netscape 4.6 it appears as though a base tag has been dumped in for me.
Thnaks
Basically...
page 1 - has links of general form "cginame?inputArgs_out.htm
this results in out.htm being written to the browser over stdout.
out.htm can have relative locations in it (both links, and graphics). I need for these hrefs and img tags to work.
I'd like to avoid having to read all the links and insert the appropriate base in them (i.e. find <a href='2nd.htm'> and change it to <a href='www.dummy.com/2nd.htm'>.
Is there a way to do this?
As an aside, if I do a view source in Netscape 4.6 it appears as though a base tag has been dumped in for me.
Thnaks
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12 Comments
I believe just using:
<BASE HREF="www.dummy.com">
should work for you. Did you say that it's already putting a line like that in there? Did you write the cgi, or is it someone else's code, and do you have access to the cgi code?
-Josh
<BASE HREF="www.dummy.com">
should work for you. Did you say that it's already putting a line like that in there? Did you write the cgi, or is it someone else's code, and do you have access to the cgi code?
-Josh
This extra base target is being generated by (I'm told by the person in charge fo the pages I'm working with) Netscape. I have no control over it. In other words, there is a base tag (that is being set to my cgi) that's being added by something OTHER than my cgi. What I've been told is that it is the browser that is adding it.
There have been cases where I've been able to add a base tag in the Head tag and the one I added overrode the one added by the browser. However, there was one case where added a proper base tag caused a problem. I'd like to know if I can turn this feature off.
There have been cases where I've been able to add a base tag in the Head tag and the one I added overrode the one added by the browser. However, there was one case where added a proper base tag caused a problem. I'd like to know if I can turn this feature off.
So the general answer is that the proper thing to do is to add a correct BASE tag to the HEAD tag of the web page I'm displaying? That should override the tag being put in by the browser?
Is your cgi-script outputing valid html? In what circumstances exactly is it adding it's own base tag? I haven't seen this behavior before so I'm curious. Are you sure it's the clients browser, and not something else on the server perhaps? Also, what base is getting set (where does the browser pick as it's base for the document)?
I think I remember seeing that if you choose to download for offline viewing, or something like that the browser would add a base tag, but that's the only circumstance that comes to mind right now...
-Josh
I think I remember seeing that if you choose to download for offline viewing, or something like that the browser would add a base tag, but that's the only circumstance that comes to mind right now...
-Josh
My comment was being written when your last one came in winkle... sorry about that. To answer that last question, yes, I should think that specifically outputting that from your cgi-progam would fix the problem.
-Josh
-Josh
Sorry, we lost internet access for a while.
Adding a base tag a the end of the generated head tag (It just didn't seem the optimum solution.) does appear to override the base tag being dropped in by the browser.
jbirk noted that this hadn't been seen before...I hadn't either, but in Netscape the extra tag is visible on the page generate by my cgi, if you do a view source on the generated page. It's in front of the first line of HTML that my cgi writes. I assume that IE is inserting it as well (though you don't see it when you view source) based on the behaviour.
I'm not sure how to close out this question since it seems to have been a discussion that led to agreement on my guess of how to deal with the situation was probably the best thing to do.
Adding a base tag a the end of the generated head tag (It just didn't seem the optimum solution.) does appear to override the base tag being dropped in by the browser.
jbirk noted that this hadn't been seen before...I hadn't either, but in Netscape the extra tag is visible on the page generate by my cgi, if you do a view source on the generated page. It's in front of the first line of HTML that my cgi writes. I assume that IE is inserting it as well (though you don't see it when you view source) based on the behaviour.
I'm not sure how to close out this question since it seems to have been a discussion that led to agreement on my guess of how to deal with the situation was probably the best thing to do.
It's ultimately up to you who gets the points, but you should award them to someone (the person you feel helped you the most). If you want to award points to a second expert for help on this question, open a second question titled "for expertname".(fill in expertname with the appropriate expert name of course:)
-Josh
-Josh
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