Re: Ampersands in URLs from David Dorward on 2005-04-23 (www-validator@w3.org from April 2005)

From: David Dorward <david@dorward.me.uk>
Date: Sat, 23 Apr 2005 20:30:24 +0100
To: iNaNimAtE <iNaNimAtE@cfxnetworks.com>
Cc: www-validator@w3.org
Message-ID: <20050423193024.GA23460@us-lot.org>

On Fri, Apr 22, 2005 at 06:57:41PM -0700, iNaNimAtE wrote:
> 
> I am having a problem validating with an ampersand in a URL. In normal HTML
> I encode it into &amp;, but in JavaScript, I have to keep it as "&" making
> the page invalid.

In HTML, <script> elements contain CDATA and ampersand characters are
perfectly OK. 

It is a lot easier to help debug problems when presented with an
example of troublesome code, but I'll hazard a guess that you are in
fact using XHTML and not HTML.

If so, then I draw your attention to section 4.8 of the XHTML 1.0
specification:

   http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/#h-4.8

You could encode your ampersands as &amp; even inside <script> blocks
in XHTML - although this would break HTML computability so you
wouldn't be able to serve your XHTML under the text/html content-type.

-- 
David Dorward                                      http://dorward.me.uk

Received on Saturday, 23 April 2005 19:30:29 UTC