Question

According to the Section 3.3, Path Component of RFC2396 – Uniform Resource Identifiers,

The path may consist of a sequence of path segments separated by a single slash “/” character. Within a path segment, the characters “/”, “;”, “=”, and “?” are reserved. Each path segment may include a sequence of parameters, indicated by the semicolon “;” character. The parameters are not significant to the parsing of relative references.

However, I have never seen a URL with a query parameters in any segment other than the final one. So, I am not sure if I am reading this correctly.

Is http://www.url.com/segment1?seg1param1=val1/page.html?pageparam1=val2 a valid URL?

Answer 1

What the RFC is referring to is something like this:

http://www.example.com/foo/bar;param=value/baz.html

That could be interpreted as the path /foo/bar/baz.html with the parameter param=value to the bar segment. No question marks are used.

Note that RFC 2396 has been obsoleted by RFC 3986, which omits specification of segment-specific parameters in favor of a general note that implementations can (and do) do different things to embed segment-specific parameters:

Aside from dot-segments in hierarchical paths, a path segment is
considered opaque by the generic syntax. URI producing applications
often use the reserved characters allowed in a segment to delimit
scheme-specific or dereference-handler-specific subcomponents. 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. Parameter types may be defined by scheme-specific
semantics, but in most cases the syntax of a parameter is specific to
the implementation of the URI’s dereferencing algorithm.