The conceptual distinction between URIs and URLs is reflected in the differences between this class and the URL class.
An instance of this class represents a URI reference in the syntactic sense defined by RFC 2396. A URI may be either absolute or relative. A URI string is parsed according to the generic syntax without regard to the scheme, if any, that it specifies. No lookup of the host, if any, is performed, and no scheme-dependent stream handler is constructed. Equality, hashing, and comparison are defined strictly in terms of the character content of the instance. In other words, a URI instance is little more than a structured string that supports the syntactic, scheme-independent operations of comparison, normalization, resolution, and relativization.
An instance of the URL class, by contrast, represents the syntactic components of a URL together with some of the information required to access the resource that it describes. A URL must be absolute, that is, it must always specify a scheme. A URL string is parsed according to its scheme. A stream handler is always established for a URL, and in fact it is impossible to create a URL instance for a scheme for which no handler is available. Equality and hashing depend upon both the scheme and the Internet address of the host, if any; comparison is not defined. In other words, a URL is a structured string that supports the syntactic operation of resolution as well as the network I/O operations of looking up the host and opening a connection to the specified resource.