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

On Fri, Jun 08, 2001 at 11:57:34PM -0400, Mike Heins wrote:
> Maybe I am arguing that the HTML 4.01 transitional spec is wrong
> and should be changed. All I wanted to do was find out solid reasons
> why the validation flagged that, and I haven't found that out.

My understanding is that there is no way to express this kind of
thing in SGML, i.e. there is no way to define an attribute type
that should not be parsed for entities. So the HTML spec writers
didn't have a choice, and '&' was just a really bad character to
use as the separator between CGI parameters.

> No real
> reason for this has been shown other than the case of &copy=, and this
> is defended because the semicolon is optional in an entity, as defined by
> the spec. Why the heck would the semicolon be optional? What good reason
> could there be for that? No one seems to know or care.

This is why they invented XML :)

-- 
Gerald Oskoboiny     http://www.w3.org/People/Gerald/
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)    http://www.w3.org/
tel:+1-613-261-6630             mailto:gerald@w3.org

Received on Monday, 11 June 2001 04:45:32 UTC