>  The problem is: double slashes are perfectly legal in a URI/URL, and for reasons I don't understand, they are in use in the wild

And what is the de-facto behavior of browsers, when double URL is used?
As far as I know, the browsers remove them, combine them as a single URL. 
(Tested on Chrome with some URLs to confirm on June 2020)

```

Where as the expected result should be:

'http://www.example.com/this//double/path'
```

This statement should be supported by

a) An RFC
b) Or behavior or some popular clients.
c) Or libcurl exhibiting this behavior will gain a huge support too.


Please share if you have any references and we should confirm ourselves to those.