Peter Bex <xxxxxx@more-magic.net> writes:

| Also note that encoding of query strings is a whole topic unto
itself.  The W3C recommendation (in the HTML spec!) is that & is
no longer used to separate query arguments.  Instead, servers
should use ;.  The reasons behind that are pretty inane (because
apparently for many people it's too hard to get the &amp; encoding
right inside HTML), but the reality is that now many servers
accept both & and ;, some still only accept & and there are
probably servers that only accept ; too.  Search the URI-common
code [1] for "application/x-www-form-urlencoded" for the gory
details.

Wow, I wasn't aware of this.  I implemented Shuttle's decoding
based on the URI spec at the time, and I've never looked at it
again.  It's good to have an expert in the discussion.