Spaces in bare URLs?

[Mark E. Shoulson]

So, in the "new" org-mode, we've done away with standard percent-encoding of URLs, in favor of a more... idiosyncratic method using backslashes.  So... what is one supposed to do about spaces in URLs?  When they're in [[link format]], with or without a description, it's no problem, but org-mode has a long tradition of support for "bare" URLs too.  We're used to being able to type a URL or other link format and have it work, right?  And that doesn't seem (to me) to be a thing that we'd want to abandon.

In org-mode 9.1.9, I can type "info:elisp#Syntactic%20Font%20Lock" and it'd work.  (Maybe not the greatest example, since %-encoding is seen more with http-based URIs, but still).  The percent-encoding is well-established and reliable, and you can *count* on it when nothing else works, because you can always fall back on plain ascii.  But that won't work in org-mode 9.3.6.  Nor will "info:elisp#Syntactic Font Lock" or "info:elisp#Syntactic\ Font\ Lock" or any other variant I've tried, short of putting it inside [[]]s or <>s (in other words, no longer using a bare URL).

I think dropping percent-escaping of URLs was a bad idea, in terms of breaking past usage and lack of consistency with the standard used for URLs everywhere else.  But I don't know what impelled the decision to drop it, so I might well be missing something important.  At any rate, it does leave a hole in what org-mode can do, a thing it used to be able to do and can't anymore.  Is there a right way to do this?  (without using delimiters.)

I haven't yet looked at how this interacts with org-protocol's store-link transaction.

~mark