Re: DTD 4.01 for ignoring & in CGI URL

On 12:14 PM 7/23/01 Nestor Diaz <nestor@engendro.com> wrote:

> I have installed validator on my web site to check my pages to conform
> to the 4.01 standard ( i don't like to use w3 validator due to
> bandwith problems), however i will like to know if i somebody had made
> a patch for 4.01 transitional dtd to not show an error where & is used
> as a separator for a URL, does it exist? i am not a experienced dtd
> programmer.

When used in an HTML attribute, & must be encoded.  If you do not, you
will get unexpected results when using conforming user agents.  Fix your
pages, don't hack the validator to mask your error.

Try the following in a conforming user agent (the trailing ; is
optional, but you are well advised to use it *and* encode your entities,
or else you may get the wrong answer) as the href for an a element:

http://www.foobar.com/sendMail.pl?fred&copy=false

http://www.foobar.com/sendMail.pl?fred&amp;copy=false

Jim