RE: Hiding email addresses in an accessible way

> Also, any idea why encoding part of the mailto: works the way
> that you have done it (mailto:) and not by using m%6Dilto: ?

It works because the processing of HTML would turn a into a in any
attribute. The unescaping of HTML (or XML) entities would be the first step
in producing the URI, and one that would generally be executed before the
link was followed. Compare this with the way that & in URIs which are often
(although it is deprecated) used to separate pieces of query-string
information must be encoded as & in a href attribute (although browsers
often treat incorrect & characters in this context as if they were correct).

Turning %61 into a would happen when the URI itself was processed by a later
application, and in this case it would not happen at all since it won't get
that far (m%61ilto would not be a recognised URI schema). The purpose of %
encodings in URI is to encode characters that are either outside of the
range allowed by URIs, or which have special meanings in URIs, and are
processed by all applicable technologies, hence they have no value here at
all.

Received on Monday, 18 August 2003 10:43:34 UTC