Re: Ampersands in URLs: Validator conflicts with RFC2396?

On Wed, 23 Oct 2002, Maarten de Boer wrote:

> I understand that this means that the & is a reserved character in URI's
> and that it's "usage within the URI component is limited to their reserved
> purpose.", which in the case of the & is seperating parameters, and not
> starting an entity!
>
> I hope you will agree with me on the matter (also because I am about to
> bet a huge amount of beer on it with a friend on mine how seems to disagree)
> or explain to me how I am interpreting the RFC incorrectly. Please answer
> me offlist - I am not subscribed.

It's all marca and mccool's fault for picking & as the separator when
designing the cgi forms interface, rather than something safer like :.

Don't get me started on that whole img/object thing, either.

OTOH, if browsers had been written by people who actually read,
understood and insisted on implementing SGML parsing rules, we'd still
be waiting for a functional Mosaic to be released.

L.

<http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/L.Wood/><L.Wood@ee.surrey.ac.uk>

Received on Thursday, 24 October 2002 12:09:21 UTC