Relative URI

choroba has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Dear Monks. Can anyone explain the following behaviour?

use strict;
use warnings;
use feature "say";

use URI;
my $base = URI->new("http://a.b.c/d/../e/");
my $uri = URI->new("http://a.b.c/y");
say $uri->rel($base); # ../../../y
[download]

The only explanation I can think of is that /../ are only understood in relative URI's, not in absolute ones. But why? Can you enlighten me?

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