RE: Amaya mishandling HREF values that contain ampersand from Dave J Woolley on 1999-07-06 (www-amaya@w3.org from July to September 1999)

From: Dave J Woolley <DJW@bts.co.uk>
Date: Tue, 6 Jul 1999 15:32:43 +0100
To: "'www-amaya@w3.org'" <www-amaya@w3.org>
Message-ID: <81E4A2BC03CED111845100104B62AFB528434F@stagecoach.bts.co.uk>

> From:	Andrew Pam [SMTP:xanni@glasswings.com.au]
> 
> 
> This seems like a rather unfortunate design oversight in the HTML 4.0
> specification.  Using %26 is preferable because it doesn't rely on
> browsers correctly converting &amp; back to an ampersand, and the
> 
	%26 and &amp; mean different things.  %26 is an &
	in a form keyword or value, whereas &amp; is a
	delimiter between form keyword value pairs, and 
	considered reserved in the non-query part of a
	URL.

	The need to escape & with &amp; is a consquence
	of HTML being an instance of SGML and has always
	been true since forms were introduced.

	One could argue that & was a bad choice as field
	delimiter, but the designers of HTML forms 
	probably didn't expect form type URLs referencing
	banner adverts, etc., to get hard coded.

Received on Tuesday, 6 July 1999 10:33:39 UTC