Re: Flagging & in URL in HTML 4.01 transitional type.

On Fri, 8 Jun 2001, Jim Correia wrote:

> On 12:11 PM 6/8/01 Mike Heins <mheins@redhat.com> wrote:
> 
> > I just went to a bunch ofunnecessary work -- due to the W3 validation
> > suite flagging unencoded '&' in a URL for the HTML 4.01 transitional
> > type.
> > 
> > Since every browser in the world must tolerate &, my opinion is that
> > this is an artificially created tempest in a teapot, created by the
> > failure of the validation suite writer to provide a "pedantic" mode.
> > Or the failure of the specification writers to create an exception
> > for this in the transitional type.
> 
> It is not.  You must encode &, otherwise
> 
>     <http://www.example.com/script.pl?foo=bar&copy=true>
>     
> can be interpreted as the copyright symbol, which is not what you
> intended.

In which case, you moan at the browser writer for not insisting on
the trailing semicolon of &copy;, or for trying to pass an unescaped
copyright symbol in a GET request.

Yes, the fact that the forms authors didn't do much reading is a
problem in principle. But it's rarely a problem in practice.

L.

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

Received on Friday, 8 June 2001 13:12:43 UTC