It's hard to find an example Of one of those now, because the kind of sites that tolerate weird comma-infested URLs in 2003 aren't the kind of sites that meticulously maintain those URLs in working order for 20+ years!
Right now, I’m knee-deep in coding my Django app. I totally dig how the framework kinda "forces" you to write neat URLs ― it’s one of my favorite things about it. This might seem silly, but I actually take immense pride in crafting simple, elegant URLs, even if the majority of the users won't even notice it.
As for the comma infested URLs, the website of one of the major news outlets in my country manifests such behavior. It always puzzled me as to what tech stack they were using. I'm not sayin they still use it today (as Vignette went belly up in 2009), but this can be a heritage from those days.
I really enjoy using Django since I first got to know it back in the 2.2 days, I’ve used nothing else for my projects, big or small. I’m head over heels for every bit of it and having recommending it for years to my friends!
Big thanks to you, Simon, for helping create this awesome piece of tech!
Example of a "correct" url
?value=A&value=B&value=C
Complete frameworks would have a method that returned the values as a list. Some like PHP required ugly work arounds where you had to name the parameter using the array syntax: value[]=A&value[]=B&value[]=C
Even if the framework supported multi-values, many preferred the shorter version: value=A,B,C and split the values in code instead
So, people who learnt programming in 2000, until ~2010 it's quite normal to see the commas as delimiter of multiple parameters.
values = request.GET.getlist("value")
# values is now ["A", "B"]
Handy if anything actually supported it, because then you could plop parameters on the end of urls without looking to see if there was already a ?
I'm sure it's used somewhere, but I can only remember it being used by Yahoo Link Tracking ;_ylt=y64encodedgunk
The only Cool URI failure on Wikipedia is the ".m" which is added to the mobile view.
https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/#{%22documentcollectionid2%22:[%22GRANDCHAMBER%22,%22CHAMBER%22],%22itemid%22:[%22001-230857%22]}