Gimme a little base

Saturday, September 17th, 2005

Listen to this post
Skip to comments

Recently I’ve found myself in situations where I need to mess around with HTML documents for sites that I haven’t previously worked on. This means that I don’t have any of the document’s dependancies locally. Plus, some of these pages are dynamically generated, requiring that I install the appropriate environment on my machine in order to work with the file.

If you just want to play around with the HTML and you don’t want to go through all the hassle of setting up environments and copying over files here’s what you do:

Copy the source of the page you want to edit into a local .html file.
Insert the <base href="" /> tag into the document <head> with the original domain in the href attribute.

That’s it. Now when you view the local HTML file, all of the images, CSS links and so on will work.