alt Hacker News> in form-urlencoded form, people were not savages
Oh yeah? I remember a lot of semicolons from Perl and other CGI stuff where we would now use ampersands, back in the day, both in the path and in the query. (Sometimes the ? itself would be written ;.)
Correct. In fact, the semicolon is part of the URI scheme standard, and the ampersand is just some ad-hoc thing that got adopted naturally without any standardization effort.