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Ask HN: Why are commas not allowed in urls?

by tronium on 5/30/14, 10:31 PM with 7 comments

I've always been curious why certain characters (e.g. commas) haven't been allowed in the url. I've never seen one used in a specialized way at all, are they just nonexistent in usage? If so, why?
  • by daveslash on 5/30/14, 10:55 PM

    My best guess. From RFC 3986 (link below)

    For example, the semicolon (";") and equals ("=") reserved characters are often used to delimit parameters and parameter values applicable to that segment. The comma (",") reserved character is often used for similar purposes. For example, one URI producer might use a segment such as "name;v=1.1" to indicate a reference to version 1.1 of "name", whereas another might use a segment such as "name,1.1" to indicate the same.

    http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3986.txt

    EDIT: This RFC is for URIs and your question was about URLs. URLs are generally considered a subset of URIs, but according to this SO answer, that might be open to debate. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/176264/whats-the-differen...

  • by rahimnathwani on 5/31/14, 12:08 PM

    Vignette StoryServer, a CMS from back in the day, had commas in all (or almost all) the URLs it generated.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StoryServer