Re: Web Magazine featuring Accessibility issues

aloha, brian!

in reply to Bruce Bailey [1], you wrote:

quote
Many thanks for the comments.  Have now fixed all but 2 of the HTML
errors (still need to add a doctype and not sure what to do about the
URL encoding which the validator doesn't like).
unquote

and then Bruce Bailey, (in reply to your reply), wrote [2]:

quote
Once you take care of both of the above [fixing the unescaped URL
ampersands and adding a DTD}, the W3C validator should start to report on
the "real" errors on your page...  [ellipses extant in original]  I'll bet
Net.Fame that once you have a validated page the display inconsistencies
with Navigator will disappear! 

Yes, it would be nice if the W3C validator did not get hung up on "trivial"
html errors (especially ones that are repeated several times on a page).
But the tool works, and it's free and very fast. 
unquote

as Bruce pointed out, the way to avoid this error message is to substitute
"&" for all of the ampersands in the linkpopularity links and any other
link that employs ampersands in the URL encoding...

my thanks to gerald oskoboiny (the maintainer of the W3C HTML validation
service [3], and the creator of it's predecessor of honored memory, the
Kinder Gentler Validator) for clarifying this for me some time ago when i
emailed him with a similar question...  i only wish i remember his
excellent explanation as to why the use of unescaped/un-charsetted URL
ampersands is a bad idea and a bad authoring practice...  hopefully, if
future iterations of authoring tools adhere to the Authoring Tool
Accessibility Guidelines [4], they won't insert (or allow the manual
insertion) of unescaped ampersands in URLs!

gregory

References:
[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-ig/1999OctDec/0138.html
[2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-ig/1999OctDec/0144.html
[3] http://validator.w3.org/
[4] http://www.w3.org/WAI/AU/WAI-AUTOOLS/
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Received on Tuesday, 19 October 1999 18:45:46 UTC