Ok, as a follow-up to my previous query, it turns out CGI took its form encoding scheme from HTML which specified that forms are to use the encoding type "application/x-www-form-urlencoded" which builds off the URL encoding scheme defined in RFC 1738 (the RFC for URLs).
Quoted Printable encoding was defined in RFC 1521 (the one for MIME, part one).
They really do have different purposes, and it wouldn't have made sense for form encoding to be based on quoted printable encoding. For one, quoted printable allows line breaks, which wouldn't have worked for urls. Though they do use a similar escaping mechanism - quoted printable uses "=0D" style escaping for its entities, while form encoding uses "%0D". Finally, they allow different characters to be unescaped. Ultimately, they're pretty similar, and serve similar purposes within their own environments. Now I know their evolution 
Sunday, December 9, 2001
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