title: Semicolon as URL query separator
body: <p>Although it is strongly recommended (<a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-html401-19991224/appendix/notes.html#h-B.2.2" rel="noreferrer">W3C source</a>, via <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Query_string#Structure" rel="noreferrer">Wikipedia</a>) for web servers to support semicolon as a separator of URL query items (in addition to ampersand), it does not seem to be generally followed.</p>
  
  <p>For example, compare</p>
  
  <p>        <a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=nemo&amp;oe=utf-8" rel="noreferrer">http://www.google.com/search?q=nemo<b>&amp;</b>oe=utf-8</a></p>
  
  <p>        <a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=nemo;oe=utf-8" rel="noreferrer">http://www.google.com/search?q=nemo<b>;</b>oe=utf-8</a></p>
  
  <p>results. (In the latter case, semicolon is, <em>or was at the time of writing this text</em>, treated as ordinary string character, as if the url was: <a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=nemo%3Boe=utf-8" rel="noreferrer">http://www.google.com/search?q=nemo<b>%3B</b>oe=utf-8</a>)</p>
  
  <p>Although the first URL parsing library i tried, behaves well:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt;&gt;&gt; from urlparse import urlparse, query_qs
  &gt;&gt;&gt; url = 'http://www.google.com/search?q=nemo;oe=utf-8'
  &gt;&gt;&gt; parse_qs(urlparse(url).query)
  {'q': ['nemo'], 'oe': ['utf-8']}
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>What is the current status of accepting semicolon as a separator, and what are potential issues or some interesting notes? (from both server and client point of view)</p>