What happens to relative HREFs in documents retrieved via PURLs?
Suppose the PURL http://purl.foo.com/DOCS/bar maps to the URL http://www.foo.com/bar/baz.html and that your browser has just retrieved this document. When an anchor (HTML tag) containing an HREF attribute whose value is not a fully-qualified URL (i.e., a “relative HREF” such as ) is selected in the browser, the browser cobbles-together a fully qualified URL to send to an HTTP server. It uses the URL, not the PURL, of the containing document up to the last “/” and appends to it the value of the HREF attribute. For example, the anchor in the document http://www.foo.com/bar/baz.html becomes the fully-qualified URL http://www.foo.com/bar/zap/frob.html sent out in a GET request from the browser. This means that the relative HREF above will not resolve to the PURL http://purl.foo.com/DOCS/zap/frob.html regardless of that PURL’s existence. For this reason, do not use relative HREFs to try to reference PURLs when writing HTML documents. Reme
