Any element defined by this specification MAY have an xml:base
attribute [W3C.REC-xmlbase-20010627]. When xml:base is used in an
Atom Document, it serves the function described in section 5.1.1 of
[RFC3986], establishing the base URI (or IRI) for resolving any
relative references found within the effective scope of the xml:base
attribute.
Atom spec says:
Right now, if you have a feed like this published at https://example.com/feed.xml, the images will load in Thunderbird and FreshRSS (https://example.com/posts/images/bird.jpg), but not fluent-reader (https://example.com/images/bird.jpg). Those other clients even handle relative URLs without xml:base, but I don’t think that’s guaranteed by the spec.
One workaround that fluent-reader accepts is to add a <base> tag inside the <content>: