The Application
I was trying out a sample application using Google AJAX Feed API. The feeds were requested from a C# windows application and the responses (feed’s HTML content) were shown in a WebBrowser control.
The Problem
The weird problem was that the HTML snippet for some feed has relative URLs and they failed to display in the WebBrowser control. [For those, who are wondering what a relative and absolute URL is, see below.]
<!-- absolute URL -->
<img src="http://www.mywebsite.com/images/image.gif" />
<!-- relative URL -->
<img src="images/image.gif" />
When i searched for it, few were trying to do a content search and to replace the relative URLs with absolute URLs. Well, this might be needed in some scenarios, but, not in my case, since the content gets rendered in a WebBrowser control.
The Solution
The BASE tag can help us here. For me, I just put the feed content inside an HTML header section with BASE tag as shown below and now my feed renders fine; added the BASE-Target option also to make it better.
<html>
<head>
<base href="http://www.mywebsite.com/images/" />
<!-- in the case of Google API, this was feed's link -->
<base target="_blank" />
<!-- Provided this so that the links will open in new window -->
</head>
<body>
<!-- in the case of Google API, body has feed content -->
<img src="image.gif" />
<a href="http://www.mynewwebsite.com">New Website</a>
</body>
</html>
The Conclusion
Hope this solves the problem for few and the logic (use of BASE tag) will be useful in other scenarios too. As for the Google AJAX Feed API, I'm hoping that Google will fix this in the upcoming versions.
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