TAN: Ampersands in URIs

This is a tangent to the list's purpose, so I'd suggest any responses be
offlist.

DJW: Conceded; you quote the spec, it must be the spec.  Thanks.  I'll pass
these messages along to the folks I know working on such database-driven
resources.  I'll have to try the numerical entity-substituted URIs with
various databases and browsers to see how it works (i.e., how well the
numerical entity substitution and named entity substitutions are implemented
by various browsers and such - I'll let you know if I come up with any
problems, unless that doesn't interest you).  As a matter of style, do folks
think the recorded URI text in the link should reflect the text or not?
(say,

<a
href="http://www.nothing.org?search=yes&amp;param=hello">http://www.nothing.
org?search=yes&amp;param=hello</a>

or

<a
href="http://www.nothing.org?search=yes&amp;param=hello">http://www.nothing.
org?search=yes&amp;amp&semi;param=hello</a>

with &semi; filling in for the entity for a semicolon because I'm too busy
to find the entity name for a semicolon right now, sorry)?  There are
reasons for using the URI in the text as well as the hyperlink.

Note, by the way, for the record, that in shorter URIs 2.3 didn't seem to
have problems with the use of the ampersand.  I don't know why, and I
haven't had time to check 2.4.

Is it also mentioned in the HTTP spec (assuming there is one on the W3 site,
I'll find it later)?  Has there been feedback from the perl module writers
etc.? Feel free to answer offlist; this message is only onlist for the
record (to record the concession).

Patrick Rourke


---- Original Message -----
From: Dave J Woolley <DJW@bts.co.uk>
To: <www-amaya@w3.org>
Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2000 9:38 AM
Subject: RE: Amaya 2.3 binary for Win 98 - long URLs


> > From: Patrick T. Rourke [SMTP:ptrourke@mediaone.net]
> >
> > return receipt on your email?).  I'm sorry, but I did not believe that
bit
> > about using named entities in CGI GET URLs.   However, I have seen the
> > same
> >
> From the HTML 4 specification:
>
> B.2.2 Ampersands in URI attribute values
> The URI that is constructed when a form is submitted [p.245] may be used
as
> an
> anchor-style link (e.g., the href attribute for the A element).
> Unfortunately, the use
> of the "&" character to separate form fields interacts with its use in
SGML
> attribute
> values to delimit character entity references [p.32] . For example, to use
> the URI
> "http://host/?x=1&y=2" as a linking URI, it must be written <A
> href="http://host/?x=1&#38;y=2"> or <A href="http://host/?x=1&amp;y=2">.
> We recommend that HTTP server implementors, and in particular, CGI
> implementors support the use of ";" in place of "&" to save authors the
> trouble of
> escaping "&" characters in this manner.
>

Received on Tuesday, 4 January 2000 12:24:29 UTC