eCommerce links-non compatible with Validator.

Hi W3C,
I hope this is the right place to post this. We have been performing
extensive recoding to our ecommerce site to be Level Three (AAA) and
HTML 4.0 compliant. So far, every page in our site passes Level Three
with no browser compatibility issues (we test all pages with both the
W3C Validator and Bobby 3.1)

I've noticed that certain links created by shopping cart ecommerce
software has a syntax that's not compatible according to the Validator.
Here's the errors:

Line 56, column 82: 

         ...
/www.upbeats.com/Merchant/merchant.mv?Screen=BASK&Store_Code=up1" onMo
...
                                                               ^

       Error: general entity "Store_Code" not defined and no default
entity

       Line 207, column 135: 

         ...
tp://www.qsound.com/tracker/tracker.exe?PID=44902&AID=47830&url=https:
...
                                                               ^

       Error: general entity "AID" not defined and no default entity

       Line 207, column 145: 

         ...
sound.com/tracker/tracker.exe?PID=44902&AID=47830&url=https://www.qsou
...
                                                               ^

       Error: general entity "url" not defined and no default entity

These are special links that are generated by the ecommerce software and
assigned to products. The syntax is not changeable or else the links
won't work properly.
Since getting all sites to work towards compliance is the ultimate goal,
I was wondering if future revisions of the validator could be modified
to not error on these types of links ???

Thanks!
Kevin
UpBeats.com

P.S. Since the errors are only on these specialized links, would a site
(like ours) still qualify to place the HTML4.0 image on the page or is
it a "hard and fast" rule that the page has to pass the validator
completely? Thank you.

(Gerald - if you answer this like last time, I would be glad to give you
a backdoor URL to view the beta pre-launch site yourself)

Received on Wednesday, 22 March 2000 12:37:04 UTC