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http://example.com/%61 is parsed as http://example.com/a by IE 10 and Chrome 31, while it is preserved as is by Safari 5 and Firefox 25. Being the behaviour of both IE and Chrome it seems a good idea to set it as the standard practice?
Note that they only do this for URLs with relative schemes and only in the path component. It's a rather special case which is why I decided against it.
WONTFIX for now. I decided against this. We'll see what browser vendors say when they start implementing this.