relative vs absolute in url tag documentation

[Chris Jerdonek]

​The language describing the url template tag is somewhat confusing because it uses the word "absolute" to describe a relative URL:

url: Returns an absolute path reference (a URL without the domain name) matching a given view...

I would replace this with language something like:

url: Returns the relative URL (URL without domain name) for the given view...

The key suggestion here is to use "relative" instead of "absolute."

[Marc Tamlyn]

Django uses the language "absolute url" to refer to the URL without the domain name in a few places. In particular the get_absolute_url() function.

To me, relative url implies a url like ../../foo/bar, not a url like /foo/bar. Strictly speaking, the url /foo/bar is neither relative or absolute, but it's closer to absolute.

[Chris Jerdonek]

I read the latest RFC (​RFC 3986) on this topic. According to that document, the return value is an "absolute-path URI reference," which is a kind of ​relative URI reference. In contrast, an ​absolute URI includes the scheme.

Django also has ​HttpRequest.build_absolute_uri(), which returns an absolute URI.

I still think the wording can be improved. "Absolute path reference" seems obscure to me, and "URL" is mentioned only parenthetically in the first sentence about "url." When I first read that sentence, I thought it was trying to say "absolute URL reference," which lead to the confusion. An early version of the docs even says exactly that, "Returns an absolute URL (i.e., a URL without the domain name)" (from ​v1.1 docs).