title: Web applications: should extraneous/unneeded query string arguments just be ignored?
body: <p>I am still fairly new to web application development, so perhaps this is a n00b question.</p>
  
  <p>It seems like most websites will just silently ignore query string arguments they do not need nor understand. For example, a github URI usually looks like:</p>
  
  <pre><code>https://github.com/airbnb
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Now if I just tack on a bogus query string, as in:</p>
  
  <pre><code>https://github.com/airbnb?foo=bar
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The page loads just fine and doesn't complain about the query string.</p>
  
  <p>This seems like a perfectly reasonable behavior, and I spot-tested some other sites and they also ignored extraneous and/or unneeded query string arguments.</p>
  
  <p>My questions are:</p>
  
  <p>1) Is this the correct or de facto behavior of most web applications? (presumably answer is yes)</p>
  
  <p>2) If (1) is yes, is the reason just common sense, convention, simplicity, etc? Or do standards like HTTP or REST have any guidance or interest in deciding how this is handled?</p>
  
  <p>Alternatives would be to:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Explicitly guard against unknown query string arguments, which is perhaps a bit heavy-handed</li>
  <li>Redirect to a "clean" version of the URL w/o the bogus strings. Again, perhaps this is unnecessary</li>
  </ul>