Relative references must start with either “/”, “./”, or “../”

This doesn’t work because js imports must reference a specific file with either a relative path or an absolute path, assuming your project structure is something like the following:

/node_modules
  /lit-element
  /other-library
/src
  /components
    my-element.js
index.html

From my-element.js, your import would be

import {LitElement, html} from '../../node_modules/lit-element/lit-element.js'

However, since this kind of configuration is confusing and you’ll probably end up setting a build script sometime too, the recommendation would be to keep your imports as they are right now and use a dev server that remaps your imports to node_modules like open-wc’s web server

Update (Feb. 2021): The web server mentioned on this question has gone through a few iterations and improvements. The current package is @web/dev-server

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