javascript - Is the a.href property always returned as absolute?

Question

In the following HTML:

<a id="link" href="page.htm">Page</a>

I'm finding that document.getElementById("link").href always returns the absolute path to page.htm rather than the relative path as I have typed it. See http://jsfiddle.net/4HgAW/.

Can I guarantee that javascript will always return the absolute path, in every browser?

The reason I'm asking is that I'm grabbing the http://www.... part to check which domain the link points to, and I need it to work for internal links as well.

Answer 1

Yes, all relevant browsers return the fully qualified URL.

If you want to retrieve the original value of the href attribute ('page.html' in this case), you can do this:

anchor.getAttribute('href')

However, that doesn't seem to work in older versions of IE (8 and below).

Live demo: http://jsfiddle.net/simevidas/4HgAW/1/