Add option to convert all relative URLs in post content to absolute

[Kronopath]

I'm aware that you folks set Atom's xml:base property to give a hint to readers as to how to interpret relative URLs. Thanks for that.

Unfortunately, some readers, in particular RSS-to-email services like follow.it and Mailchimp, apparently don't support xml:base properly. This is especially problematic when it comes to images: several RSS-to-email services show broken images when they use relative URLs for their src fields.

It would be great if there was an option to auto-convert all relative URLs in HTML attributes (like src or href) to absolute.

Other issues like #315 and #185 have brought this up before but haven't got traction, so this seems to be a recurring issue.

[toydotgame]

+1 to this today after seeing how xml:base is hardcoded to {{ post.url }}. This sucks. Assets organised like

_posts/
    \- 2000-01-01-foo-bar.md
assets/
    \- img/
        \- 2000-01-01-foo-bar/
            |- example.png
            |- ...
            \- baz.png

(Or any alternative. This example is different from my own site)

will break, because xml:base is set to the post's base URL.

I have images in my article's content written as:

![](/assets/img/2000-01-01-foo-bar/example.png)

and it's great on the web, but the erroneous xml:base turns

/assets/img/2000-01-01-foo-bar/example.png

into

/posts/2000-01-01-foo-bar/assets/img/2000-01-01-foo-bar/example.png

I'd love the option to set the base to /…

[Kronopath]

I don't think that's how xml:base is supposed to be interpreted. It should be the same as HTML, where a leading slash means "this is relative to the root". The Atom spec specifies that it should be the same as RCF3986 section 5.1.1, and AFAIK, that's the same RFC that HTML uses to specify how relative URLs are supposed to be resolved.

What RSS readers are you finding that treat images with leading slashes as relative to the page URL rather than the root domain?

Some light research suggests that conformance to this spec is quite bad (1, 2, 3, 4), hence this request for a feature to just make everything absolute.

[toydotgame]

I was using Thunderbird and it seemed to not be liking it at all. Since my first post I had switched out jekyll-feed with my own Liquid-based feed.xml markup file instead to make a feed myself, and I omitted xml:base, which seemed to help. I also found that serving Jekyll with host: localhost let Thunderbird see anything whereas host: 0.0.0.0 (which I previously had to allow LAN access) caused issues.

Some light research suggests that conformance to this spec is quite bad (1, 2, 3, 4), hence this request for a feature to just make everything absolute.

Yeah; I found it quite inconsistent. Honestly I can't say for sure what part of the various changes I made to my Liquid file made it work the best in Thunderbird (and later NetNewsWire), nor do I understand why. ;-;