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Matrix URIs, a URL syntax from Tim Berners-Lee that never shipped (1996)

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Re: Matrix URIs, a URL syntax from Tim Berners-Lee that never shipped (1996)

#3

Post by pavlov »

drcongo wrote: post #2

I quite like the semi-colons. I wonder how we ended up with the slightly unwieldy ?foo=bar&some=thing

Think “how do I implement a search engine whose interface is visible in the browser address bar?” This was a reasonable question on the early web. And that’s why they are called query params.

The question mark indicates you’re making a query. And the ampersand is a boolean operator. You could imagine query params implementing | in addition to &.

Re: Matrix URIs, a URL syntax from Tim Berners-Lee that never shipped (1996)

#4

Post by _micheee »

drcongo wrote: post #2

I quite like the semi-colons. I wonder how we ended up with the slightly unwieldy ?foo=bar&some=thing

Seems Like the recommendation changed from supporting ; and & to only using &.

Thinking about it, it is a little surprising as, if I remember correctly, in HTML source you should encode & as & right?

Re: Matrix URIs, a URL syntax from Tim Berners-Lee that never shipped (1996)

#6

Post by drcongo »

pavlov wrote: post #3
drcongo wrote: post #2

I quite like the semi-colons. I wonder how we ended up with the slightly unwieldy ?foo=bar&some=thing

Think “how do I implement a search engine whose interface is visible in the browser address bar?” This was a reasonable question on the early web. And that’s why they are called query params. The question mark indicates you’re making a query. And the ampersand is a boolean operator. You could imagine query params implementing | in addition to &.

I think to non-techies the semi-colons are still more intuitive - I often see non-technical people mess up the ? and &, either by using just one of them or by getting them the wrong way around.

Re: Matrix URIs, a URL syntax from Tim Berners-Lee that never shipped (1996)

#8

Post by echoangle »

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #5
drcongo wrote: post #2

I quite like the semi-colons. I wonder how we ended up with the slightly unwieldy ?foo=bar&some=thing

Is there any reason we couldn't just use that anyway?

I think some browsers display the query params muted compared to the part before (or maybe I’m confusing it with the behavior that the domain is highlighted to prevent phishing?). But technically, you can just parse the request url however you want. I also think it shouldn’t matter with regards to any caching layers inbetween.

Re: Matrix URIs, a URL syntax from Tim Berners-Lee that never shipped (1996)

#9

Post by TRiG_Ireland »

drcongo wrote: post #2

I quite like the semi-colons. I wonder how we ended up with the slightly unwieldy ?foo=bar&some=thing

I'm certain I've seen websites which used semi-colons rather than question marks and ampersands for query parameters. The Jehovah's Witnesses website used to, many years ago. I believe that one of the reasons behind this design was that it meant that there were no special characters which needed to be escaped in HTML. This design works fine for links, but not for forms, which will generate normal URLs containing question marks and ampersands. I suppose you can use POST-Redirect-GET forms, and generate your own URLs using semi-colons.
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