Re: Unescaped Ampersands in Bookmark URL

Andrew@Gmail wrote:

> Dear WWW Validator Staff;

The www-validator-css list is a public mailing list.

> I just noticed a small issue regarding the bookmark provided
> by the CSS validator (http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/), when
> a page passes validation

Which bookmark? The page says (in some situations) "you can just add the 
current page to your bookmarks or hotlist", which is OK. It also says "If 
you would like to create a link to this page...".

> The issue I would like to note is that the bookmark provided contains
> unescaped ampersand characters,

As it shall. Ampersands must not be escaped in URLs when used as bookmarks. 
Ampersand escaping is relevant in _markup_. In general, if you link to 
something and the URL contains an "&", you need to escape it, and this is no 
different from using text containing "&" in normal content.

> which then fail validation if embedded
> into a web page and then passed to the Markup validator
> (http://validator.w3.org).

It fails if you don't write proper markup. This applies to any use of a URL 
with "&", except that in some cases it doesn't apply when the "&" happens to 
be followed by a name of a defined entity, which is worse.

But why would you link to the CSS validator result? There are more flexible 
ways to make CSS checking easier. If you link to the CSS validator result on 
your web page, you just add to the noise on the web - such links are 
irrelevant or worse to _visitors_.

-- 
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

Received on Sunday, 19 October 2008 12:37:27 UTC