since in the former case, your server-side code only has to test whether the value of the parameter ‘randomcomic‘ is nonempty/nonzero, which is really easy, whereas in the latter case you have to somehow detect whether the string ‘randomcomic‘ is present or not, and I could see that being less reliable (depends a lot on what’s doing the parsing of the parameter string; if your parser is expecting a sequence of ‘name=value’ pairs separated by ampersands — what is normally supposed to be there — it may get confused by stuff that doesn’t fit that pattern)