There <base> tag came up in discussion yesterday, and I wonder how many of you have ever heard of it, let alone make use of it when playing with web pages. A few days ago Rosemary Probert posed a question with regard to SSI not working in one of her pages. To check a web page is quite straight forward, you open the page and copy the source code and save it into a new page of your text editor, give it a name and save. Once you open the page, you quickly find if the objects within the page have absolute or relative urls. With absolute urls there is no problem as your browser downloads the images, css and scripts by following the urls provided in each of the links. However, relative paths create a problem in that you need establish what the absolute url for each of the links is and adjust them each manually. That's where the <base> tag can prove very useful, and here is what you need to do. When initially downloaded from the server, the url for the page provided the base url, i.e. everything before the actual filename of the page. Get that url, e.g. http:mydomain.com/directory-one/mystuff/page-1.html (minus page-1.html) and place it in a <base> tag as follows:- <html> <head> <base href="http:mydomain.com/directory-one/mystuff/"> <meta> ... <title> ... </title> </head> Now your browser will go looking along the same path that server originally looked when it delivered the contents of the page. Here are a couple of examples using Rosemary Probert's page:- The first is the page with the relative links - http://countjustonce.com/banbury/rosemary-1a.html The second is using the same page but including - <base href="http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~engcbanb/war-memorials/adderbury/"> http://countjustonce.com/banbury/rosemary-1b.html So there you are - the <base> tag and its uses. In fact it is possible to use it along with javascript to dynamically change the base url and serve for instance a whole lot of different images while still using the same relative links. The practical use is when checking or trying modifications to pages and not wanting to disturb your local files. P.S !important... Always ensure the <base> tag is placed before any CSS or script links in the head of the page. Barry