RE: eCommerce links-non compatible with Validator.

From: Christian Smith (csmith@barebones.com)
Date: Wed, Mar 22 2000 

Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2000 16:57:15 -0500
From: Christian Smith <csmith@barebones.com>
To: "Kevin R. Phillips" <kevin@audiodesigns.com>
cc: www-validator@w3.org
Message-ID: <20000322165715-f01010601-00c74d94@204.107.232.107>
Subject: RE: eCommerce links-non compatible with Validator.

On Wednesday, March 22, 2000 at 13:46, kevin@audiodesigns.com (Kevin R. Phillips) wrote:

> Hi Christian,
> Two questions then (and by the way thanks to ALL of you for your support):
> 
> *Are you saying that we can just change the & in the existing link to &amp;
> and the ecommerce software should still detect the link as if it was still
> only the & sign?

Yes, given any well behaved browser (and I'm not aware of any version 2 or
later browsers for which this is broken) the browser will decode the
encoded & and request the correct url.

> * Do we need to actually go into the core system that generates the syntax
> for the product purchase links and custom modify it to issue the &amp;
> instead of & in every link it issues (we did not create this software but
> we can make code level changes)?

Regardless of how you do it, when the url appears in an html document, any
instance of & must be encoded as &amp; as long as the context of url in
the document is CDATA (this includes the content of an HREF attribute of
an A tag.

Note also that some of your URLs have instances of / used in the query
string and these need to be URI encoded in order for the URL to be a valid
URL (this is a separate issue).

See

<http://info.internet.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc/files/rfc2396.txt>

-- 
Christian Smith  |  csmith@barebones.com  |  http://web.barebones.com

He who dies with the most friends... Is still dead!