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Full vs partial URL in webpages, is there a rule for this?

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From: Birkir R. Gunnarsson
Date: Nov 7, 2011 3:36PM

Hi gang

I came across an interesting problem today, that turned out not to
really be an accessibility problem.
A user reported that clicking on a link on an internal wbsite did not
produce any results (no new page was loaded).
A quick check on the html code confirmed that the problem appears to
be that the href attribute of the anchor link only gives the internal
folder url.
(since the website is a closed one I am probably not allowed to
provide th exact url).
Think of it as
a href="/subdirectory/document"
rather than
a href="http://mypage.com/subdirectory/documents"
Actually, the specific page was coded in asp.net I believe and the
references looked like

<a href="/?PageID=337"
I confirmed this by cocatenating this part with the page address in
the address bar, and this took me to the subpage of the site as
expected.

Since this is a website where users have to log in, it seems to be ok
for the developers to assume that the url to the site itself is
concatenated with the links in the href part .. but this is not the
case.
Isn't that an example of bad coding, shouldn't full urls always be
included in links, or are there situations where this technique is
acceptable, or even recommended?
I know this is not exactly accessibility, but I had to address it as
an accessibility problem, feel free to let me know if this is too off
topic.
Thanks
-Birkir