Hyperlink changed in Mail

Question

I have web pages created in iWeb.
When I paste the following hyperlink...
http://web.mac.com/drdocument/iWeb/Via%20Media%20Spokane/Welcome.html
...the link appears correctly in the Mail message, underlined, ready to click.
However, when clicked the link has characters added and becomes...
http://web.mac.com/drdocument/iWeb/Via%2520Media%2520Spokane/Welcome.html
The characters "25" are added following the percent signs, so I get the "page not found" window.
Anyone else had this problem? Ideas why it happens? Any workarounds or fixes?
Thanks,
Ken

Answer 1

http://www.webteacher.org/winexp/navigate/url.html
"...Comments: Blank Spaces
A second pitfall in Web addressing is associated with the fact that different systems deal with blank spaces in file or directory names in different ways. For example, Windows file names can have blank spaces, but Unix systems generally use blank spaces as separators between names. Thus, a filename July Budget Reports is a perfectly acceptable filename for Windows, but is a bad choice for a Unix system because it will interpret this filename as July because of the trailing blank space unless special actions are taken. (For example, always enclosing the entire filename in double quotes would cause a Unix system to construe the blank spaces as part of the file name.)
The common ways that Unix systems name such files without employing blank spaces is to use upper case letters to start words (with no blanks between words), or to use underlines or dashes to indicate where blank spaces would be. For example,
JulyBudgetReports
JulyBudgetReports
July-Budget-Reports
would all be acceptable Unix filenames.
Words to the Wise
Now if you are a Windows user developing your own material for the Web, you probably would like to ignore these "peculiarities" with Unix systems concerning case sensitivity and blank spaces. Unfortunately, you cannot because most of the servers on the Internet use Unix operating systems, and indeed the Internet itself largely developed in a Unix environment. This has two consequences:
Because of the Web's Unix heritage, URL addresses generally cannot contain blank spaces (if blank spaces are required they must be inserted with special character sequences).
If your Web material is served from a Unix server, the case of filenames and directories will matter.
Therefore, if you are going to be developing material for the Web, we suggest strongly that you immediately get into the habit of (1) assuming case sensitivity in all your filenames, and (2) not using blank spaces in any filenames."
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