News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Servo: Inside Mozilla's mission to reinvent the web browser by groks on Wednesday February 26, 2014 @06:33AM (#7304231)
> ...what idiot decided that ampersands...

    example.com/?a=1&b=2
    vs.
    example.com/?a=1;b=2
The second example doesn't need to be encoded in HTML.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3481664/semicolon-as-url...

Re:Servo: Inside Mozilla's mission to reinvent the web browser by TheZenPsycho on Wednesday February 26, 2014 @06:36AM (#7304244)
And that would be great if it didn't inadvertently break certain browsers, proxies, web servers and parameter parsers. Back in the day the advice was you could use & or ;. TBL had subtly different semantics in mind for them though: apparently ; was meant to represent some coordinates in some spacial system while & was the normal query parameter separator.

Somewhere along the line, for some reason, everyone settled on & and the web ossified around the assumption that was the only character that ever gets used.