I initially understood the prose in Section 3 like you interpret it (separator not terminator). That was a mistake. The RFC's BNF grammar is quite clearly stati

I initially understood the prose in Section 3 like you interpret it (separator not terminator). That was a mistake. The RFC's BNF grammar is quite clearly stating that path segments may be empty, so it may end in "/". Therefore, in relation to the article, the URI RFC does indeed not offer guidance about what would be the better approach.