When entering a network-path reference (//example.com/foo
) into a browser’s address bar, you don’t end up on a HTTP(S) page, because the browser doesn’t know the base URI. See details.
When linking a network-path reference from a HTML page, a base URI can be established. Standard-conforming user agents (browsers etc.) are capable to understand such references.
For structured data (e.g., with Schema.org), make sure that you correctly specify that the property value is a URI reference, otherwise it would be interpreted as string. So in Microdata and RDFa, you have to use elements like a
/img
/link
/etc., in JSON-LD you have to use @id
(but your @context
might pre-define that the values of certain properties are by default @id
s).