fix($location): support alternative means of setting application base path

[caitp]

In HTML, the <base> tag is used to configure how relative hyperlinks are resolved. In Angular, it has another use, configuring how URLs are rewritten. Because of this, setting the base URL to some external path outside of the application would cause $location.$$parse() to throw (which is the desired behaviour).

This change enables developers to imperatively configure the application basePath, taking advantage of the natural HTML use of the tag without breaking Angular applications.

Example:

angular.module("test", [])
 .config(function($locationProvider) {
   $locationProvider.baseHref("http://foo.com/the/base/application/path/");
 });

Closes #4442

[IgorMinar]

please see #3102 and #2805

this problem is much more complicated IMO and $locationProvider.baseHref is not a desirable solution.

[caitp]

I'm not sure that it's much more complicated, but I see your point that a directive for specifying the app root url would be simpler. I think most of the extended problems mentioned on those issues are sort of unrelated, or tangentially related at best. What this really comes down to is how URLs are resolved, by the browser and by $location.

N'either of those issues seem to be PRs implementing the declarative solution, though.

[thomasofdenmark]

+1

[soluml]

+1

[ChadKillingsworth]

Base tags break SVG icons in FireFox. Without an officially documented way to set the baseHref of an application, we are left with either dropping support for browsers without history.pushState or decorating an internal, undocumented angular core service $browser.