Grauw’s blog

In response to a post on Anne’s blog, here are my thoughts on base URIs (xml:base in particular), which are still only seldom used...

I’d say this a nice example of putting xml:base to good use:

<style type="text/css" xml:base="css/">
h1 { background: url(images/bg.png); }
</style>

URIs in CSS are relative to the file that contains it, and that means that inline CSS is relative to the document instead of e.g. to a common /css/ directory.

For single-page interfaces it is quite useful, too, because the files that are loaded into the document have the same base URI as the document root, while you might for example want them to resolve the paths of images etc. relative to the document and not to the root. To solve that, you could place a base URI on the root element of the loaded segment.

This is valid for XHTML, too – usually, if you have e.g. a menu, its paths are relative to the root: you prefix them with a / so that the menu still works even though the actual document is at e.g. http://www.grauw.nl/blog/. This has the limitation however that the base of your site has to be in the root of your URL – I can’t just relocate my website to http://www.grauw.nl/site/. If you instead just specify an xml:base on the menu, and use relative links, then such a thing is only a matter of changing the base URI.

With regard to XPath, in XPath 2.0 there is the function fn:resolve-uri(). With only one parameter (a relative URI), it will be resolved to the static context. I think this includes changes of the context caused by xml:base, if supported by the XSLT processor. And even if this is not the case, it isn’t really hard to write a custom function which resolves an URI by recursively resolving xml:base attributes up the document tree.