lynx-dev base href -- how generated by Lynx?

[William December Starr]

Greetings.  I'm brand-new to this list, so please forgive me if I'm
re-raising an issue that has already been bashed to death.  (I tried
searching through the archives for earlier mention... the discussion
around <http://www.flora.org/lynx-dev/html/month052002/msg00061.html>
was the closest I could come up with with regard to recent versions
of Lynx, and that seemed somewhat inconclusive.  But then again,
perhaps there _is_ no conclusion.)

It has to do with how Lynx generates/extracts/determines/whatevers a
base href for use with an HTML page that contains no explicit "BASE
HREF=..." statement of its own.

Take two running-on-Unix-machines versions of Lynx:

Lynx Version 2.7.1 (1997)

and:

Lynx Version 2.8.4rel.1 (17 Jul 2001)

Give them both the command:

lynx -base -source http://www.cuttingsarchive.org.uk/telos/

at about the same time (roughly 2010 GMT, 1 March 2003) and their
outputs will differ in the header forced by the "-base" option.

2.7.1's header will be:

<!-- X-URL: http://www.cuttingsarchive.org.uk/telos/ -->
<BASE HREF="http://www.cuttingsarchive.org.uk/telos/";>

and 2.8.4rel.1's will be:

<!-- X-URL: http://www.cuttingsarchive.org.uk/telos/ -->
<!-- Date: Sat, 01 Mar 2003 20:10:05 GMT -->
<!-- Last-Modified: Sat, 01 Mar 2003 17:24:47 GMT -->
<BASE 
HREF="http://www.cuttingsarchive.org.uk/EASYNET1/r/a/r.anderson/telos/index.htm";>

Question: which of those base hrefs is the one that Lynx is supposed
to resolve to/determine/generate, and why?

(Note: I am able to navigate this site's links under 2.7.1, whereas I
get 404'd on every link under 2.8.4rel.1.  On the other hand, when I
append "index.htm" to the URL (giving Lynx a file rather than a
directory as its target?) the site _is_ navigable under 2.8.4rel.1.)

-- William December Starr <address@hidden>


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