Re: Parser Error?

On Wed, 9 Jun 1999, Lloyd Wood wrote:

> On Wed, 9 Jun 1999, Brian Gilkison wrote:
> 
> > On Wed, 9 Jun 1999, Andreas Mayer-Guerr wrote:
> > >Please check this and you will understand what I mean:
> > >
> > >http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.baud.de%2Frc5%2Findex.html
> > >
> > >I think these error's are not justified. Please tell me if I'm wrong/your
> > >comment.
> > 
> > The ampersand character ("&") is what is generating your error, since the
> > validator is assuming what follows to be an entity reference. 
> 
> Since it isn't an entity reference, it's safe to assume that the
> validator is in the wrong.

whoops, should have elaborated on this. Convention is to use ""
to delimit HREF entities, so common sense suggests that & shouldn't be
viewed as a terminator. Never mind interactions with other character
sets.

It's much the same reasoning why <TABLE WIDTH="100%"> gets quoted,
since % is reserved in SGML (as is either + or -; can't remember
which, so quote both) You don't see people writing e.g. <TABLE
WIDTH=100&percent;>, and you'd think that HTML would have handled SGML
reserved characters more carefully by setting up &percent;

A multitude of cascading errors. Storm in a teacup...

L.

<L.Wood@surrey.ac.uk>PGP<http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/L.Wood/>

Received on Wednesday, 9 June 1999 16:49:38 UTC