Table of contents

Appendices

4.2 Granularity of base URI information

Relative URIs appearing in an XML document are always resolved relative to either an element, a document entity, or an external entity. There is no provision for finer granularity, such as per-attribute, per-character, or per-entity base information. Neither internal entities, whether declared in the internal subset or in an external DTD, nor freestanding text (text not enclosed in an element) in an external entity, are considered to set a base URI separate from the base URI in scope for the entity reference.

The base URI of a document entity or an external entity is determined by RFC 2396 rules, namely, that the base URI is the URI used to retrieve the document entity or external entity.

The base URI of an element is:

1. the base URI specified by an xml:base attribute on the element, if one exists, otherwise

2. the base URI of the element's parent element within the document or external entity, if one exists, otherwise

3. the base URI of the document entity or external entity containing the element.