Partial URLs

Once you are viewing a document located somewhere on the network (say, the document http://www.yoyodyne.com/pub/afile.html), you can use a partial, or relative, URL to point to another file in the same directory, on the same machine, being served by the same server software. For example, if another file exists in that same directory called "anotherfile.html", then anotherfile.html is a valid partial URL at that point.

This provides an easy way to build sets of hypertext documents. If a set of hypertext documents is sitting in a common directory, it can refer to one another (i.e., be hyperlinked) by just its filenames - however a reader got to one of the documents, a jump can be made to any other document in the same directory by merely using the other document's filename as the partial URL at that point. The additional information (access method, hostname, port number, directory name, etc.) will be assumed based on the URL used to reach the first document.