Re: [whatwg/url] URL.relative proposal (#421)

Copying my comment from https://github.com/whatwg/url/issues/136#issuecomment-423715051:

> I'd like to push for some notion of a "relative URL" as a first-class object, at least in the spec terminology if not in the API. I'm working on defining a file format that includes a construct for referring to documents from other documents, naturally using URLs.
> 
> The thing is, I want to define some behavior around this construct that's independent of the base URL, but still uses URL notions like the path. The spec as it stands provides me no way of saying "this is a relative URL, and the path must contain at least one element that's an identifier" or whatever.
> 
> To put this more generally: tools often process documents at build time, in a context-free manner, where the base URL is not known. They may even process documents that may be used in multiple contexts with different base URLs. I believe this is why humans tend to gravitate towards referring to "relative URLs" as objects in and of themselves, and there's value in the spec matching this intuition in some way. Right now, it provides no way to even talk about a URL unless you have all the context of how the document that contains it will be used.
> 
> One possibility would be for the spec to include a definition of "relative URL" that explicitly includes an initial "ambiguous segment" and forbids certain operations if that segment is non-empty.

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