Overview
Somehow the <base> tag remains unknown to most of the web developers, but that’s quite normal. However let see what it can do. By adding the <base> tag in the head of the page you tell every link into that page how to open and a default href value. Thus if you have:
<base href="http://www.stoimen.com/blog/"> |
every link without a href attribute will open this link. That’s really useful in some cases. However the most interesting part of the base tag is the target attribute.
target=”_blank”
Everybody knows what will result from this attribute attached to a anchor tag.
<a href="http://www.stoimen.com" target="_blank">Click Here</a> |
But with only adding this base tag:
<base target="_blank"> |
into the head … all the links will open in a new tab/window, depending on the browser preferences.
Watch out!
If you add the line above somewhere into the <body> tag the browser, will put it into the <head> which will make it difficult to track. A good practice is to place it directly into the <head>!