Purpose of anchor() and $baseURL vs. relative URLs

[eluser]wiredesignz[/eluser]
The only benefit of using relative URL's in client side code (HTML or CSS) is to reduce the overall transmitted file size and maybe reduce the amount of typing you need to do.

The browser still has to prefix the source http://domain when resolving the URL properly.

Whereas base_url() and anchor() provide the full URL dynamically and help reduce typing.