Absolute URL's acting like relative URL's

Question

When I have a link like http://site.com, clicking it goes to that URL just fine.

But when the link is just www.site.com, it adds this URL to the parent

Answer 1

Because www.parentsite.com is interpreted as a relative address, like for example index.htm, as opposed to an absolute URL which consists of protocol, hostname, and path.

When I'm on example.com's front page....

• contact.html is a relative address, the absolute end result will be http://example.com/contact.html (the browser does this as an internal calculation)

• images/ is a relative address, resulting in http://example.com/images/

• www.xyz.com results in http://example.com/www.xyz.com

You need to prefix the protocol (eg. http://) to make the browser understand that you mean a full URL, and treat it accordingly.

Here's a background info article on the issue on MSDN.