No, Senthil is correct.

My original liking for this idea came from my mistaken impression that a value without an '=' was different from a value with an '='.  But clearly the practice in the industry (the de facto standard) is that they are the same, and indicate that the value of the parameter is the empty string.

So, urls do *not* have any way of representing a null value (as differentiated from an empty string).  All url values are strings.  This means that the correct value to use for a python value is always its string representation, which in the case of None is "None", just as the correct representation of a Python boolean value is "True" or "False" (since http also does not have any specifically boolean type, only string values).