- From: Nick Kew <nick@webthing.com>
- Date: Fri, 8 Jun 2001 19:10:18 +0100 (BST)
- To: Lloyd Wood <l.wood@eim.surrey.ac.uk>
- cc: www-validator@w3.org
On Fri, 8 Jun 2001, Lloyd Wood wrote: > On Fri, 8 Jun 2001, Jim Correia wrote: > > > On 12:11 PM 6/8/01 Mike Heins <mheins@redhat.com> wrote: (is that Mike Heins as in minivend?) > > > Since every browser in the world must tolerate &, Tolerate - fine. But it introduces serious ambiguity, which browsers have to error-correct one way or another. > 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. The validator is "pedantic" by definition. That is its purpose. Several years ago, the old webtechs validator used a hack that would allow unescaped ampersands in URLs (specifically, it would escape them internally, before feeding the document to sgmls). This was IMO a Bad Thing, since it did much to spread confusion, including perhaps yours. > > <http://www.example.com/script.pl?foo=bar©=true> > > > > can be interpreted as the copyright symbol, which is not what you > > intended. Not only can, but will. And we're not talking some obscure browser here either: we're talking (AFAIK) every modern browser. > In which case, you moan at the browser writer for not insisting on > the trailing semicolon of © Browsers do lots of error-correction, and we don't (usually) complain). > ,or for trying to pass an unescaped > copyright symbol in a GET request. No, they do URL-escape any characters that require it. > Yes, the fact that the forms authors didn't do much reading is a > problem in principle. But it's rarely a problem in practice. AIUI the URLencoding scheme predates the expression of HTML as SGML. -- Nick Kew
Received on Saturday, 9 June 2001 06:53:34 UTC