Currently Parsoid sets the URL of the page itself as the base URL. This means that [[OS/2]] has <base href="//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2">, which means that links on that page have to look like <a href="../Unix"> in order to point to the right place.

This practice is evil and should die in a fire. Instead, the base URL should be set to the base URL of the wiki, e.g. <base href="//en.wikipedia.org/wiki">.

The fact that the base URL currently depends on the page name causes lots of problems.

Mixing content from multiple pages (like in Flow) is hard, because you have to normalize away all the <base> differences. Even embedding content from one page standalone is difficult because Parsoid's (variable) choice for the base URL is not a reasonable choice for your entire UI's base URL.

Creating new content (like in VE) would be hard if it weren't for the fact that Parsoid tolerates <a href="Foo"> where it would really expect <a href="../Foo">. If VE had to actually produce correct hrefs in its output, it would have to do some pretty evil analysis of the base URL.

Copying content from one page to another is hit by both issues: you have to process the hrefs of copied links based on both the source's base URL and the destination's base URL, which is quite error-prone.

This change has been discussed before and everyone seems to agree that it should happen, but it hasn't happened yet, so let's start tracking it here.

Version: unspecified
Severity: normal
See Also:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=73291