Ampersands + "Last modified:" Malfunctions

Hi!

I'm not a member of this list, but I just wanted to note a couple of 
validator bugs... at:

  http://www.htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/problems.html#amp

, the documentation suggests:

> To avoid problems with both validators and browsers, always use 
> & in place of &:
>
> <a href="foo.cgi?chapter=1&amp;section=2">...</a>

However, many CGI engines will not accept &amp; - and rather than 
forcing all those webmasters out there to stop programming in the 
commonly-accepted fashion, why not change the validator to accept 
ampersands, when they're embedded in anchor tags?  Half my pages 
won't validate correctly, because I've linked to CGI sites which 
operate only with ampersands.  It seems like we've got the cart 
before the horse, here.  ;-)

Also, when providing a direct link to the validation results:

  http://validator.w3.org/check/referer

, the validator generates a "Last modified:" field which has nothing 
to do with the page being validated.  In other words, the validator 
indicates that any given page is being modified continuously!

HTH-
Alan C. Baird
e: ia@apc.net
w: http://www.9TimeZones.com