Return strings from URL functions

[willfaught]

It's surprising that a "URL" is represented by something called template.HTML, even if it's just a string under the hood.

This breaks calling .GetPage with the output of relLangURL.

@jmooring:

ref, relref, relURL, relLangURL, absURL, and absLangURL return template.HTML. The original implementations returned a string. It in unclear when/why the change was made, but it may have happened when the template functions were namespaced.

I've been thinking about this, and can't come up with a good reason for the current data type. We added the urls.JoinPath a few months ago, which returns a string.

See gohugoio/hugoDocs#2000

Alternatively, every function that takes a string could be changed to also take a template.HTML.

What version of Hugo are you using (hugo version)?

$ hugo version
hugo v0.119.0-b84644c008e0dc2c4b67bd69cccf87a41a03937e+extended darwin/amd64 BuildDate=2023-09-24T15:20:17Z VendorInfo=brew

Does this issue reproduce with the latest release?

Yes

[jmooring]

The original implementations returned a string

Correction: the original implementation of absURL returned template.HTML.

Note that .Page.Ref and .Page.RelRef already return strings.

[github-actions]

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