- From: <pdf@bizfon.com>
- Date: Wed, 5 Jul 2000 13:43:49 -0400
- To: Paul McGarry <paulm@opentec.com.au>
- cc: www-validator@w3.org
Hi Paul, I see the point you are trying to make, but none the less, unentified ampersands are invalid attributes. Most browsers will display them correctly even if they are unentified, but that doesn't make it valid. While I did find it interesting that the W3 would generate a page with the invalid use of an ampersand, I must say that the methods you used were a little sneaky. The link that contained the offending ampersand was a generated URL which came from user input. I don't see why you would try to validate a page with a query string in the URL (maybe there's some reason I don't know about). Anyway, while your methods may have been sneaky, I agree that the validator should display valid pages. This may be trickier than it sounds though because I think it would mean parsing the user input, and replacing "&" with "&" but at the same time, being careful not to replace the "&" if it is the "&" in "&". So I would say you found a bug in the validator, but you have not in any way proven that unentified ampersands are "just heavily frowned upon". Peter Foti Paul McGarry <paulm@opentec.com.au> on 07/05/2000 03:39:25 AM To: www-validator@w3.org cc: (bcc: Peter Foti) Subject: On ampersands. Hello, I've been trying to determine whether unentified ampersands really are invalid in attributes in html 4. I've come to the conclusion that it isn't invalid, just heavily frowned upon. Nothing particularly interesting or new there to you guys I imagine, but in my experiments my fevered brain discovered that while the html validator marks unentified ampersands invalid, it is happy to generate such URLs itself and then display the W3 tick on it's page. Talk about double standards! In case you find this vaguely interesting you can see for yourself by visiting links from here: http://homepages.tig.com.au/~mcgarry/opera/ampersand/index.html And if it looks like I have too much time on my hands, I only wish that were true..... -- Paul McGarry mailto:paulm@opentec.com.au Systems Integrator http://www.opentec.com.au Opentec Pty Ltd http://www.iebusiness.com.au 6 Lyon Park Road Phone: (02) 9878 1744 North Ryde NSW 2113 Fax: (02) 9878 1755
Received on Wednesday, 5 July 2000 13:44:20 UTC