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Comment by Bockit | Hacker News Reader

That went from "Oh, another article about the parts of a URI" to "wow..." very quickly. The path parameters were kind of neat, I was under the impression ; could be used instead of & and was only for query string parameters (Didn't even know path parameters were a thing).

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I believe it used to be recommended that applications accept ; to separate query string parameters so that if a url containing query string parameters was double-html-escaped for some reason...

e.g. a link to

  http://example.com/?colour=blue&age=old

with link text

  balloon

should appear in html as

  <a href="http://example.com/?colour=blue&amp;age=old">balloon</a>

but might erroneously appear as

  <a href="http://example.com/?colour=blue&amp;amp;age=old">balloon</a>

...or if a (simple) client neglected to html-decode the uri for some reason, then the link would still work.

Whether this was officially recommended or was merely a folk recommendation, I don't know.

The difference:

  Does not work: http://www.foobar.com/api?v=2/get?item=1
  Does work: http://www.foobar.com/api;v=2/get?item=1

I didn't either and I like the idea of that. I'll have to try that when writing up the paging for my next web app for something like search results.

Path parameters aren't particularly well supported on many server platforms, unfortunately.

Of course, it does depend on what parser gets them first!

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