@malaire Here’s an example of where this happens. These images come from Chrome 81.0.4044.129.
I went to google.com and typed in “foo bar” in the text input for the search string.
Zooming in on the URL, you can see the plus:
Let’s check some other sites:
I’ve been a web developer for as long as the web has been in existence. A plus in a querystring has been there since the very beginning - regardless of what the standard says.
Are you saying that, for instance, if you go to https://news.ycombinator.com/, scroll to the bottom of the page, and enter “foo bar” into the search form that you are taken to the page https://hn.algolia.com/?q=foo%20bar and not the page https://hn.algolia.com/?q=foo+bar?