consider matching structured input

[wanderview]

Sometimes a developer may only care about matching a part of the URL; e.g. just against pathname. The plan of record to support this is:

let pattern = new URLPattern({ pathname: "/foo/bar/*" });

This matches the pathname, but all other URL components are wildcards.

This mostly works for the use case, but is still awkward to use since URLPattern.match() requires parseable full URLs to be passed in. For example:

const input = "/foo/bar/baz";

// fails due to invalid input
pattern.match(input);

// awkward and expensive, but works
pattern.match(new URL(input, self.location).href);

To make this more ergonomic we could allow URLPattern.match() to accept structured input:

pattern.match({ pathname: input });

This allows the developer to indicate they only have a pathname. The other components of the URL are unknown and will only match if the pattern has a wildcard specified for the component.

[wanderview]

I've included this in the prototype and its working well. Marking decided.

[wanderview]

This is now codified in the spec.