Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:

> Po Lu <luangruo@yahoo.com> writes:
>
>>> Hmm... this is better, but at least I am still in the dark regarding
>>> the need for this optional argument.  E.g., what would happen if you
>>> use that tag, but don't specify the URI?
>>
>> I'm in the dark too.  I am not a web developer, and browser engines are
>> remarkably lax about these things, but hopefully Lars can explain better
>> (after all, shr must deal with these things too), so I added him to the
>> Ccs.
>
> The base URI is used when expanding relative links.  So if you have HTML
> that looks like
>
> <a href="foo.html"><img src="img.png"></a>
>
> then the browser can't resolve those two URLs without having the base
> URI.  So you'd pass in a base URI of https://example.com/foo/bar/zot if
> that's where the HTML snippet is from.
>
> When the URLs are absolute, the base URI is irrelevant.

Thanks, does this look OK to you?  And I'm afraid I'm not terribly good
at phrasing this into words, so I would really appreciate it if you
could help write that section of the manual.