HTML 5 <base> Tag

The HTML <base> tag is used to specify a base URI, or URL, for relative links. For example, you can set the base URL once at the top of your page, then all subsequent relative links will use that URL as a starting point.

Try it

The link above will actually resolve to https://www.quackit.com/javascript/javascript_arrays.cfm regardless of the URL of the current page. This is because the base URL (https://www.quackit.com/javascript/) is prepended to the (relative) URL indicated in the link (javascript_arrays.cfm)

The <base> tag must be between the document's <head> tags. Also, there must be no more than one base element per document.

Attributes

HTML tags can contain one or more attributes. Attributes are added to a tag to provide the browser with more information about how the tag should appear or behave. Attributes consist of a name and a value separated by an equals (=) sign, with the value surrounded by double quotes. Here's an example, style="color:black;".

There are 3 kinds of attributes that you can add to your HTML tags: Element-specific, global, and event handler content attributes.

The attributes that you can add to this tag are listed below.

Element-Specific Attributes

The following table shows the attributes that are specific to this tag/element.

AttributeDescription
hrefSpecifies the URI/URL to use.
targetTarget frame/window

Global Attributes

The following attributes are standard across all HTML 5 tags (although the tabindex attribute does not apply to dialog elements).

For a full explanation of these attributes, see HTML 5 global attributes.

Event Handler Content Attributes

Event handler content attributes enable you to invoke a script from within your HTML. The script is invoked when a certain "event" occurs. Each event handler content attribute deals with a different event.

For a full list of event handlers, see HTML 5 event handler content attributes.