I know what you’re thinking, as I thought the same thing and tried that long time ago. Problem was that if to use just the slash “/”, the absence of the dot causes the link to be measured down from the current page. I understand what you’re saying, and I tried that where, if in the http://localhost/about/staff, I have a link using:
href=”/news/articles”
the link is then interpreted as
“http://localhost/about/staff/news/articles”
where again the beginning of the url, the “/”, is being interpreted not as “http://localhost” but rather “http://localhost/about/staff”.
I am pretty sure this has some to do with a combination of my apache configuration files and what wordpress is actually doing under the covers to implement permalinking using “/%postname%/”
