For %09

• It is silly to impose the same syntax on all URLs, and there is no functional requirement for this. URLs have a functional requirement to specify an access method and an opaque parameter package for use by that access method. Period. There is general agreement on this.
• It happens that gopher already has reserved a character (tab) as a seperator, so "?" as a seperator was a poor choice in the first place.
• The ? convention for all URLs that do searches will either break or require re-written clients to deal with searches of relational databases. Mandating "?" for all searches in all clients is a very bad idea.