Technically yes you can do URL encoding and everything will work perfectly. As you probably realise our rendering engine will accept URL encoding.

There are only two real reason we haven't used it:

• If users want to edit the source code, non ULR-encoded equations (with some care for a few special characters) are easily read and understood. On the other hand you would be a very special person if you could read URL-encoding straight off. But this does raise the question, how many people use a WYSIWYG editor but subsequently also edit the HTML source?
• our Non-URL encoding is actually shorter, on average.

Obviously, we have to encode certain components, which broadly consists of:

• space -> &space;
• plus -> +

It sounds like it would be good if we added this as an option within the plugin: to use URL encoding or not.

Thanks for the good question,

Will