href link change?

[likes2burn]

I had a website I developed a few months back and suddenly it seems the links are all bad. What's happening is all the links I typed like so:

<a href="www.example.net/">visit this site</a>
Browsers assumes means "http://www.example.com/www.example.net/" as if it's a subdomain.

Is this a recent change of W3 standards in handling relative URLs? I could have sworn these all worked originally.

[edited by: tedster at 5:09 am (utc) on Jun 24, 2010]
[edit reason] switch to example.com - it can never be owned [/edit]

[topr8]

there has not been a recent change.
they are working as they should

outbound links to external domains should begin with http://

[penders]

Your links might work as expected in IE - but not other browsers. IE has been forgiving of omitted "http://" in the past.

[piatkow]

As topr8 says, that is how it should work.
At a guess you had been using a browser that had previously been forgiving but a bug fix or upgrade has corrected this.

I had a similar problem some years ago with tables. One browser assumed a /tr when it found a new row but another didn't. I had been copying and pasting rows and hadn't noticed that I had lost the /tr.

This is why you should always test your site in IE and at least one other browser.