The particular case was how a.practices populates an empty href to link to APG. We have respec syntax for such links - and in fact they're sometimes present in addition to a.practices but at least once neither is used.
So it seems this "helpful" magic is not helping as much.
While reviewing https://github.com/w3c/aria/pull/2136/files I remembered that I wanted to suggest re-thinking resolveReferences.
The particular case was how
a.practicespopulates an empty href to link to APG. We have respec syntax for such links - and in fact they're sometimes present in addition toa.practicesbut at least once neither is used.So it seems this "helpful" magic is not helping as much.