Asset handling in CodeIgniter with the BASE tag

There are many suggested ways to handle your assets (CSS, images, JavaScript, etc) in CodeIgniter including my very own Asset library. Some people use paths relative to the web root like this:

<img src="/image/logo.gif" alt="Logo" />

This method works fine if your application will only EVER exist in the web root. If that works for you, fine, no need to read on.

Those that need their assets to be found wherever their CodeIgniter application happens to sit (root, sub-directory, sub-domain) can use libraries, helpers or add base_url() in front of all references to an asset. This does work but seems a bit overkill for something that can be handled with HTML.

My new evil scheme? Use the lesser-known HTML tag to get all of our links and references working perfectly. This should go into the of your document.

<base href="<?=base_url();?>">

Now all your relative links will be relative to your base_url. Brilliant!

<img src="images/logo.gif" alt="Logo" />

That will work fine, assuming your images are stored in public_html/images. Use some common sense on that.