Parameter separator in URLs, the case of misused question mark

Question

What I don\'t really understand is the benefit of using \'?\' instead of \'&\' in urls:

Answer 1

The answer's pretty much in this article - http://www.skorks.com/2010/05/what-every-developer-should-know-about-urls/ . To highlight it, here goes :

Query is the preferred way to send some parameters to a resource on the server. These are key=value pairs and are separated from the rest of the URL by a ? (question mark) character and are normally separated from each other by & (ampersand) characters. What you may not know is the fact that it is legal to separate them from each other by the ; (semi-colon) character as well. The following URLs are equivalent:

http://www.blah.com/some/crazy/path.html?param1=foo¶m2=bar

http://www.blah.com/some/crazy/path.html?param1=foo;param2