Firstly, routing is not inherently hierarchical. It's a process of mapping pieces of URL to variables with the purpose of figuring out which action to call. So

Firstly, routing is not inherently hierarchical. It's a process of mapping pieces of URL to variables with the purpose of figuring out which action to call. So your argument that implies routing it inherently related to URL paths (by the virtue of their names) is invalid. It can and often does involve queries. Secondly, if you ever tried to implement a web framework from scratch, you would quickly see that routing something like "?controller=blah&action=blah&id=123" is MUCH easier than dealing with virtual paths. Aside from relative URL issues in templates, you also need to deal with differences between real assets and everything else. Thirdly, my proposal does not go contrary to rfc3986. "The query component contains non-hierarchical data" is not the same as "query component must not contain any hierarchical data". If it did, you could also argue that it's "wrong" to put an address int query string, because, hey, it's a hierarchy. (And again, routing is not inherently hierarchical.) Fourthly, base tag doesn't deal with the original use case I described and is a PITA to maintain.