You say there's no solution for & in URLs, but & seems to work [re-send]

Howdy.  First off, thanks for the wonderful validator.w3.org service. 
It found several minor errors in my pages that Bobby, a similar web-bot
(http://www.cast.org/bobby/) failed to find.

One question, though.  On one of my pages I had a bunch of URLs
containing '&'s.  validator complained, and when I clicked on the more
info link, your documentation said that there's no solution for this
problem other than complaining to the owners of the CGI programs that
they shouldn't use '&' as a separator character. 

However, I knew that the solution for this problem outside of URL
specifications was to transform the '&' to an '&', and sure enough,
this worked for these hyperlinks as well.  I tested them with Navigator
3 on Mac OS, Navigator 3 and IE 4 on NT, and Navigator 3 and lynx on
HP-UX.  Is this just a feature that happens to work in a lot of
browsers, or is it in line with the HTML 3.2 spec?

If the latter, perhaps you could update that more info page.

One other minor quibble is that I dislike the HTML 3.2 / 4.0 "validated"
icons.  I started putting the graphic on the bottom of all my validated
pages, but the graphic just struck me as too large and flashy.  Against
gray backgrounds, especially, the white and yellow in the icon really
draw the eye away from the real content on the page.  I know you have
more important things to do than make new graphics, but I just wanted to
let you know that I would have been advertising your service on more
than just my bookmarks page if not for the distraction issue.

[I am not on the www-validator mailing list, so if you reply there, I
won't see it.]

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dan Harkless           | NOTE: Due to SPAM I have implemented a caller-
dan@wave.eng.uci.edu   | ID-like policy for this account.  Put "re-send"
Unitech Research, Inc. | in your Subject to bypass; finger me for more.

Received on Monday, 1 March 1999 22:58:41 UTC