Parsing a URI should not be a straight pass to open(2) [or CreateFile in Windows parlance] to get to the filesystem directly anyway ... Think of the security pr

Parsing a URI should not be a straight pass to open(2) [or CreateFile in Windows parlance] to get to the filesystem directly anyway ... Think of the security problems with that, or URIs where they don't actually correspond to filesystem objects. So, IIS already needs to parse the path distinctly. I'm going to say it didn't cause them a lot of trouble. Note also that Windows tends to use 16 bit Unicode everywhere, that's probably a bigger thing for IIS than the path separator.