(Following is the text of the linked section of the Wikipedia entry.)
Structure
A typical URL containing a query string is as follows:
http://server/path/program?query_string
When a server receives a request for such a page, it runs a program (if configured to do so), passing the query_string unchanged to the program. The question mark is used as a separator and is not part of the query string.
A link in a web page may have a URL that contains a query string, however, HTML defines three ways a web browser can generate the query string:
a web form via the ... element
a server-side image map via the ismap attribute on the element with a construction
an indexed search via the now deprecated element
Web forms
The main use of query strings is to contain the content of an HTML form, also known as web form. In particular, when a form containing the fields field1, field2, field3 is submitted, the content of the fields is encoded as a query string as follows:
field1=value1&field2=value2&field3=value3...
The query string is composed of a series of field-value pairs.
Within each pair, the field name and value are separated by an equals sign. The equals sign may be omitted if the value is an empty string.
The series of pairs is separated by the ampersand, '&' (or semicolon, ';' for URLs embedded in HTML and not generated by a ...; see below).
While there is no definitive standard, most web frameworks allow multiple values to be associated with a single field:
field1=value1&field1=value2&field1=value3...
For each field of the form, the query string contains a pair field=value. Web forms may include fields that are not visible to the user; these fields are included in the query string when the form is submitted
This convention is a W3C recommendation. W3C recommends that all web servers support semicolon separators in addition to ampersand separators[6] to allow application/x-www-form-urlencoded query strings in URLs within HTML documents without having to entity escape ampersands.
Technically, the form content is only encoded as a query string when the form submission method is GET. The same encoding is used by default when the submission method is POST, but the result is not sent as a query string, that is, is not added to the action URL of the form. Rather, the string is sent as the body of the HTTP request.