[Zope] Question about the base href that Zope adds automatically

[Richard Barrett]

At 12:30 08/11/2001 +0100, Jan-Frode Myklebust wrote:
> >
> > can anyone explain me why zope always adds the <base
> > href="http://my.server.com/" /> to every HTML file it's serving. What's the
> > purpose of this, and is it really necessary?
>
>
>It's because when a browser accesses http://host/folder and
>http://host/folder/ your browser should understand the relative URL
>within your documents.
>
>Without the basehref, your browser will think that http://host/folder
>is a html-file, and prepend http://host/ to relative URLs. It will
>however understand that http://host/folder/ is a folder, and prepend
>http://host/folder/ to relative URLs there. So depending on the
>trailing slash, you might get different results.

While the explanation is correct it is arguable that Zope is wrong in 
resolving the problem in this way.

If you look at Apache's behaviour, a request for http://host/folder yields 
a 301 Moved Permanently response redirecting the browser to 
http://host/folder/. The browser then has to make a second request for 
http://host/folder/ which is satisfied. The fact that this second request 
usually yields the contents of http://host/folder/index.html (or whatever 
file is specified by Apache's DirectoryIndex directive) is OK as applying 
relative URLs to page URLs like http://host/folder/ and 
http://host/folder/index.html gives the same result.

The problem is that Zope is treating http://host/folder and 
http://host/folder/ as being equivalent absolute URLs, when they are not 
from a URL parsing/joining standpoint, and is circumventing the problem 
this creates by inserting a <base> tag into the response.

There is an argument for saying that Zope should be modified so that if the 
requested URL does not end in a '/' and the object it then address is 
derived from ObjectManager, it should redirect the browser to the requested 
URL + '/'.

That said, if you insert your own <base> tag in a page, Zope doesn't mess 
with it, and you are going to get the results you should expect, i.e. the 
browser will interpret the relative URLs on the page with respect to the 
base URL you specified rather than the one that Zope would have supplied, 
this latter being the URL for the directory from which the page was served.


> >
> > By the way, is there an easy way to get rid of this if it's not necessary?
> >
>
>Put in your own, or edit python/ZPublisher/HTTPResponse.py if you
>*really* want to get rid of it.
>
>
>   -jf
>
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