What is the purpose of the Base Element

I can’t seem to wrap my head around what the <base> element really does, and what its purpose is. Can anyone explain in laymans terms “what” and “why”. I am new to webdesign and just trying to understand all the elements. I would appreciate any help. Thanks:eek:

Hi wwwebster. Welcome to SitePoint. :slight_smile:

The base element isn’t used much, and is rarely needed. Here is some more info on it:

base (HTML element)

Basically, it can make writing out URLs a bit simpler. If you, say, have lots of images on a page, instead of doing something like this:

<body>
<img src="../../images/image1.gif" alt="">
<img src="../../images/image2.gif" alt="">
<img src="../../images/image3.gif" alt="">
</body>

you could instead do this:


<head>
<base href="http://mysite.com/images/">
</head>

<body>
<img src="image1.gif" alt="">
<img src="image2.gif" alt="">
<img src="image3.gif" alt="">
</body>

But really, I prefer to do something like this without the base element:

<body>
<img src="/images/image1.gif" alt="">
<img src="/images/image2.gif" alt="">
<img src="/images/image3.gif" alt="">
</body>

The / at the start of the URL is a root-relative URL, and is much more straightforward. It won’t work in testing on you own computer, though, unless you use a virtual server environment, such as is offered by MAMP (for Mac) ow XAMPP (for PC).

Thanks for the help. It makes perfect sense to me now. Thanks for the info on the VSE. I am really starting to love this stuff.