Investigate the use of <base> instead of linkPrefix

[gesposito]

I think linkPrefix might be some (unnecessary) overhead for newcomers, we could use:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Web/HTML/Element/base

http://webdesign.tutsplus.com/articles/quick-tip-set-relative-urls-with-the-base-tag--cms-21399

[KyleAMathews]

Wow... I've never heard of actually. Yeah, this looks perfect. So it looks like we could keep things basically as they are now except when someone builds with --prefix-links, that'd be a cue to the html.js to add the <base> tag?

It seems like browser support is near 100%. Is there any downsides to using this technique?

[gesposito]

Only downside that I understand is that it needs an absolute path, so linkPrefix (or whatever we want to call the <base> url) needs to be the "production" url.
Then, any relative url (assets/, Link to, etc) is going to be relative to the root <base> url, therefore prefixed.

[KyleAMathews]

But you should only prefix links for production? I can't think of any other
time it'd be useful.
On Mon, Feb 29, 2016 at 2:02 AM Gianluca Esposito [email protected]
wrote:

Only downside that I understand is that it needs absolute path, so
linkPrefix needs to be the "production" url.
Then, any relative url (assets/, Link to, etc) is going to be relative to
the root url.

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#161 (comment).

[gesposito]

Yes, same use of linkPrefix

<base href="https://example.github.io/your-project/">

when you want to prefix all relative links with /your-project/

Only needed for production (no need for localhost, since Gatsby is "normalizing" the url) AND root path is not /.

[KyleAMathews]

After some googling, it looks like the tag has some serious downsides...

• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1889076/is-it-recommended-to-use-the-base-html-tag
• https://www.drupal.org/node/13148

Leaning towards closing this... thoughts @gesposito?

[gesposito]

Looks like the only problem we might care about (other two are old issues) is the behaviour with #anchor links.
We can go ahead and close this, I'll try to dig deeper if I'm able to.

[KyleAMathews]

Yeah, breaking #anchor links is my main concern as they're often used on static sites.