RE: bug from Jelks Cabaniss on 2000-05-23 (html-tidy@w3.org from April to June 2000)

From: Jelks Cabaniss <jelks@jelks.nu>
Date: Tue, 23 May 2000 15:02:15 -0400
To: <html-tidy@w3.org>
Message-ID: <NBBBICMNIPCICMKJECCBEENKDJAA.jelks@jelks.nu>

> The application I am writing runs tidy and then programmatically extracts the
> hrefs from the resulting tidied document and spiders those hrefs. The
> spider was
> not replacing &amp; with & before sending the http request. I will do the
> replacement inside the spider library. I just assumed that urls within hrefs
> would be exactly the same after running jtidy.

The best course for such dilemmas is to run the HTML in question through a
validator.  You can use the W3C's validator or (my favorite)
www.htmlhelp.com/tools/validator  ...  in either case, it would tell you that
naked ampersands (i.e., not escaped as &amp;) are not OK, either in URLs or
anywhere else.  A validator is analogous a final spelling checker.  It's good to
run a document through a validator, even if it's been "Tidied".  Tidy is good,
but the validator is the ultimate test.


/Jelks

Received on Tuesday, 23 May 2000 15:03:08 UTC