Re: Flagging & in URL in HTML 4.01 transitional type.

• From: jason r tibbetts <tibbettj@verdi.iisd.sra.com>
• Date: Fri, 08 Jun 2001 13:10:00 -0400
• To: www-validator@w3.org
• CC: Jim Correia <correia@barebones.com>
• Message-ID: <3B2106E8.F023B774@verdi.sra.com>

> > I just went to a bunch ofunnecessary work -- due to the W3 validation
> > suite flagging unencoded '&' in a URL for the HTML 4.01 transitional
> > type.
> >
> > Since every browser in the world must tolerate &, my opinion is that
> > this is an artificially created tempest in a teapot, created by the
> > failure of the validation suite writer to provide a "pedantic" mode.
> > Or the failure of the specification writers to create an exception
> > for this in the transitional type.
> 
> It is not.  You must encode &, otherwise
> 
>     <http://www.example.com/script.pl?foo=bar&copy=true>
> 
> can be interpreted as the copyright symbol, which is not what you
> intended.  Encoding the ampersand will work, so just do it.

And encode your '<' and '>', too.

Depending on your editor of choice, just set up a macro expansion for '&' when
it's followed by whitespace. This is easy enough to do in vi, emacs and
(horrors) MS Word; you're on your own for other editors. (Jim Correia, how is
this done in BBEdit?)

Received on Friday, 8 June 2001 13:11:10 UTC