Right, makes perfect sense of course as the standard goes.
Sometimes just wish URLs were handled in special way in shells. Fish isn't compatible with bash, couldn't it go step further? Some magic isn't always bad...
You give bash more credit than it deserves. `wget url?a=1&b=2` is parsed as`wget url?a=1 & ; b=2` ie, it runs `wget url?a=1` in the background and sets the shell variable b=2.