Absolute and relative URLs

The URI general syntax allows a resource to be specified as an absoluteor a relative URL. Absolute URLs identify the protocol http://, the host, and the path of the resource, and can be used alone to locate a resource. Here’s an example absolute URL:

http://webdesign.onyou.ch/2010/12/26/absolute-and-relative-urls/

Relative URLs don’t contain all the components and are always considered with respect to a base URL. A relative URL is resolved to an absolute URL, with respect to the base URL. Typically, a relative URL contains the path components of a resource and allows related sets of resources to reference each other in a relative way. This allows path hierarchies to be readily changed without the need to change every URL embedded in a set of documents.

The following table shows several relative URLs and how they are resolved to the corresponding absolute URLs given the base URL http://onyou.ch/a/b/c.html?foo=bar.