Edit: It does. So, this would be yet another of the squillion-ish examples to support the advice "Please, for the love of god, always enclose your URLs in '<>'.". (And if you're writing a general-purpose URL linkifier, PLEASE just assume that everything between those characters IS part of the URL, rather than assuming you know better than the user.)
I don't believe that they can, not unencoded. Check out the grammar in the relevant RFC[0], as well as the discussion about URL-unsafe characters in the RFC that's updated by 3986 [1], from which I'll quote below.
> Characters can be unsafe for a number of reasons. ... The characters "<" and ">" are unsafe because they are used as the delimiters around URLs in free text
Also note the "APPENDIX" section on page 22 of RFC1738, which provides recommendations for embedding URLs in other contexts (like, suchas, in an essay, email, or internet forum post.)
Do you have standards documents that disagree with these IETF ones?
If you're using the observed behavior of your browser's address bar as your proof that ">" is valid in a URL, do note that the URL
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44826199>hello there
might appear to contain a space and the ">" character, but it is actually represented as
URLs with the characters ' ' and '>' in them are not valid URLs. Perhaps your web browser does things differently than my Firefox and Chrome instances, but when I copy out that pretty-printed URL from the address bar and paste it, I get the following string:
<https://www.discogs.com/artist/207714-!!!>
Edit: It does. So, this would be yet another of the squillion-ish examples to support the advice "Please, for the love of god, always enclose your URLs in '<>'.". (And if you're writing a general-purpose URL linkifier, PLEASE just assume that everything between those characters IS part of the URL, rather than assuming you know better than the user.)