- From: Philip Taylor (Webmaster, Ret'd) <P.Taylor@Rhul.Ac.Uk>
- Date: Sat, 23 Apr 2011 15:05:03 +0100
- To: public-qa-dev Dev <public-qa-dev@w3.org>
sierkb@gmx.de wrote: > Hi! > > Question: is there, by any means, anywhere, a definition, if in HTML (concrete: HTML 4.01) and/or it's parent, SGML, it's allowed and valid to shorten an entity (like&) to "&;" (Ampersant + Semikolon) in a given<a href="URL"> with&; instead of&" within an URL construct, so that the W3C Markup Validator is right, in NOT labeling it as an error and let passing it as valid? > > Meaning: is it by any means correct and valid, to use "&;" instead of masking a "&" with"&" in a given URL? When NOT valid, why does the W3C Markup Validator say so, while parsing/validating against HTML 4.01 Strict -- and in contrast (and my expectation) throws an (from my point of view expectable and correct) error, when parsing/validating against XHTML 1.0 Strict while sticking to the Mimetype text/html)? > Validating such an URL against HTML5 also throws an error message. But not so if validated as/against HTML 4.01. I think you are conflating two unrelated questions : 1) Is &; valid ? 2) Does &; represent & ? I suspect that the answer to the former is "yes", and to the latter "no". Philip Taylor
Received on Saturday, 23 April 2011 14:05:33 UTC