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Comment by EE84M3i | Hacker News Reader

Why?

Presumably because the title of the page contains a slash, which isn’t escaped in the url. Some Webservers might have interpreted as a directory.

Wikipedia is not made up of a series of flat files that have the same paths as you see in the URL. The URL layout is controlled by MediaWiki and it's free to do whatever it wants with the slashes. After rewriting, the URL looks like:

  https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Load-link%2Fstore-conditional

You can actually visit that if you like.

It has a slash in it; I would have expected that to need escaping.

Slashes are not special in URLs (unlike #, & and semicolon). It's only servers that parse them as path separators.

See section 3.3 "Path" in RFC 3986: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3986#section-3.3

> A path consists of a sequence of path segments separated by a slash ("/") character

RFC 3986 says one thing, but what the HTTP protocol allows servers to do and they actually implement is another thing.

HTTP protocol RFC pretty explicitly says that the Request-URI transmitted is a "path" and refers to URI RFC to define "path". There is really no ambiguity here, HTTP as a protocol expects resources to be organized as an hierarchy and accessed via a path, which is delimited by "/" characters. As such the protocol definitely reserves and assigns special meaning to "/" in paths.

Of course servers are perfectly free to do whatever they want, there is no HTTP police to stop them.

It continues like this: "Use of the slash character to indicate hierarchy is only required when a URI will be used as the context for relative references [...] The path segments "." and ".." [...] are intended for use at the beginning of a relative-path reference (Section 4.2) to indicate relative position within the hierarchical tree of names. [...] Aside from dot-segments in hierarchical paths, a path segment is considered opaque by the generic syntax."

As long as Wikipedia doesn't use relative paths it is not a problem to have slashes in the URL.

Wikipedia doesn't.

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