Validator complaining about & in URL parameters?

Question

I got an inscrutable fault in one of my pages this morning,
and eventually, in
desperation, I threw it at the Validator page. The page was
an Index page for
my photo album, with a link attached to each item. The links
are of the form
http://www.corybas.com/New_page.php?path=Holidays&item=RPHols_007,
and (among other things) the Validator produced a torrent of
complaints to the
effect that the & ought to have been encoded. I tried
replacing the & with %36,
and the page promptly failed to load.
Am I overlooking something, or is the Validator complaining
when it shouldn't?
(It did also complain about another error, which did enable
me to find my
problem.)
Clancy

Answer 1

On Tue, 19 Aug 2008 14:42:32 +1000, Clancy
<[email protected]>
wrote:
>I got an inscrutable fault in one of my pages this
morning, and eventually, in
>desperation, I threw it at the Validator page. The page
was an Index page for
>my photo album, with a link attached to each item. The
links are of the form
>
>
http://www.corybas.com/New_page.php?path=Holidays&item=RPHols_007,
>
This displays "Unkown item; this page cannot be displayed." -
do you
really mean this page ?
>and (among other things) the Validator produced a torrent
of complaints to the
>effect that the & ought to have been encoded. I tried
replacing the & with %36,
>and the page promptly failed to load.
Are you loading text in design or code mode, as Dw does code
& as
here:
<p>The &amp; character
put in design mode</p>
but if you put in code view it does this - which may be what
the
validator is complaining about.
<p>The & character put in code mode</p>
>
>Am I overlooking something, or is the Validator
complaining when it shouldn't?
>
But the validator on the page you gave errors about this
which may
effect character encoding:
Character Encoding mismatch!
The character encoding specified in the HTTP header (utf-8)
is
different from the value in the <meta> element
(iso-8859-1). I will
use the value from the HTTP header (utf-8) for this
validation. "
~Malcolm~*...
~*