Re: validator and rfc2368

On Tue, 2 Jul 2002, D. Stimits wrote:

> The error in question is basically related to anchor HREF's that are
> email links. In the html in question, I have ensured that it is properly
> URL encoded for characters that are not intended to have special meaning
> (basically everything except actual "?" and a single "&"). According to
> rfc2368 (see http://ftp.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/uri/rfc2368.txt), and as
> tested and which works on multiple browsers and email clients, I should
> be able to specify both a default subject and default body to an email
> message. The format used is as follows (pretend URL encoding has been
> done where expected, I am keeping it readable for people here):
>  <A
> HREF="mailto:someone@nowhere.com?subject=TheSubject&body=SomeBodyText>The
> Link</A>
>
> The validator seems to think the page is ok, except for one thing:
>      Error: unknown entity "body"
>
> I have tried experiments with the URL encoding, with upper and lower
> case letters, so on, and the validator always says that "body" is an
> unknown entity. Is the html 4.0 transitional/loose.dtd the cause of
> this, or is the validator incorrect (the browsers and email clients seem
> to think it is valid). The only alternative I can think of to a falty
> validator is that I'm using the wrong standards, that the rfc does not
> apply.

From RFC 2368:

   Because the "&" (ampersand) character is reserved in HTML, any mailto
   URL which contains an ampersand must be spelled differently in HTML
   than in other contexts.  A mailto URL which appears in an HTML
   document must use "&amp;" instead of "&".

-- 
Liam Quinn

Received on Wednesday, 3 July 2002 14:09:25 UTC