unescaped & or unknown entity "&whatever"

On Sun, 22 Jun 2003 17:30:17 +0100, Jacqui or (maybe) Pete
<porjes@spamcop.net> wrote:

>In article <i2d8fv8ml3ckqos9oer5qceravld201177@4ax.com>,
>kruse@cityscape.co.uk says...
>> What does that mean please when it comes up as a validation warning?
>>
>
>URL?

Well, for instance, peek at http://www.kruse.co.uk/thesiger.htm
although it's duped on pretty much most of my sites that offer amazon
books. Try running the html Tidy validator on them and look for
warnings.

BB
MFW Britpack www.extreme-positioning.co.uk
There is only one war, and it's not the rich against the poor,
the blacks against the whites, the Federation against the Borg,
or the Democrats versus the Republicans. It's those of us who
aren't complete idiots against those of us who are.

On Sun, 22 Jun 2003 23:43:40 GMT, "rf" <making.it.up@the.time> wrote:

>"Big Bill" <kruse@cityscape.co.uk> wrote in message
>news:h4ecfvc2ccl7l4qaibmf0ncjvtmor8f7lk@4ax.com.. .
>> On Sun, 22 Jun 2003 17:30:17 +0100, Jacqui or (maybe) Pete
>> <porjes@spamcop.net> wrote:
>>
>> >In article <i2d8fv8ml3ckqos9oer5qceravld201177@4ax.com>,
>> >kruse@cityscape.co.uk says...
>> >> What does that mean please when it comes up as a validation warning?
>> >>
>> >
>> >URL?
>>
>> Well, for instance, peek at http://www.kruse.co.uk/thesiger.htm
>> although it's duped on pretty much most of my sites that offer amazon
>> books. Try running the html Tidy validator on them and look for
>> warnings.
>
>Did you not read the other replies in this thread?

Yes I did indeed. It seems to me tho like Hitbox and amazon didn't.
May not be such a problem with Amazon but I believe that Hitbox run
some kind of checksum thingy on their code to make sure the end-user
(in this instance, myself) isn't tampering with it. You can have a
freebie service from Hitbox, which involves you having visible ads for
their clients on your pages, or a paid for invisible service (they do
stats, by the way). I want ALL the code on my pages to validate,
third-party or not, and when I've tried tinkering with Hitbox code in
the past (like hiding their "privacy" link, which is unaesthetically
conspicuous) the Hitbox service has promptly ceased to function.
It would be a big, big help, of course, if these giants of the
industry would write code that validates in the first place, but it
seems to be too much for them.

>In HTML An ampersand signifies the start of an entity.
>Read about them here:
>http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/sgml/entities.html
>
>Line 680:
>
>src=http://hg1.hitbox.com/HG?hc=wf155&cd=1&hv=6&ce=u&hb=WQ511206BNAA17EN0&n=
>Wilfred Thesiger

And the above isn't my code, it's Hitbox's.

>&cd for example is not a valid entity.

I know.

> If you want a & in your HTML you must
>use &amp;

It ain't my HTML and I'm not sure you're entirely correct actually.
I've got a suspicion that &cd should naybe be written &cd; which
might, er, cause it to be considered escaped. Given that Hitbox and
Amazon presumably *want* us to use their facilities and therefore
their code, I really shouldn't have to be worrying about this.
I'll experiment further.

BB

>The above line should be
>
>src=http://hg1.hitbox.com/HG?hc=wf155&amp;cd=1&amp;hv=6&ce=u&amp;hb=WQ511206
>BNAA17EN0&amp;n=Wilfred Thesiger
>
>It gets worse. If your URL had for example ?hc=wf155&nbsp=xxx then some
>browsers may decide that the &nbsp part is the non breaking space entity,
>even though the ; is missing from the end. Your url could end up containing
>?hc=wf155 =xxx
>
>
>HTH
>
>Cheers
>Richard.
>

MFW Britpack www.extreme-positioning.co.uk
There is only one war, and it's not the rich against the poor,
the blacks against the whites, the Federation against the Borg,
or the Democrats versus the Republicans. It's those of us who
aren't complete idiots against those of us who are.

Big Bill <kruse@cityscape.co.uk> wrote:

>Try running the html Tidy validator on them and look for
>warnings.

Tidy is not a validator, it's an HTML checker, and a bad one.


Headless

Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
> Matthias Gutfeldt <worte@gmx.at> wrote:
>
>
>>It's neither a validator nor a checker. According to the docs,
>>"Tidy is able to fix up a wide range of problems and to bring to
>>your attention things that you need to work on yourself."
>
>
> That comes pretty close to "checker" in my book. What would a checker
> do if not "bring to your attention things that you need to work on
> yourself"?
>
> It indeed automatically fixes or "fixes" things, too, but this just
> means that it's not _only_ a checker.

Well, in my understanding a "checker" just checks the document and
points out those errors it finds. It doesn't attempt to fix them for you
- that's what a "fixer" would do :-). But perhaps that's splitting hairs .


>>It does that fairly well, at least for the files I throw at it.
>
>
> Me too. Probably the best tool to turn data saved from MS Word as
> "HTML" (or "Web page" or whatever they call it) into decent HTML.
> Given the mess it has to work with, it does it quite well.

Yes, I'm usually very pleased. A bit of global search&replace after that
to do things Tidy isn't meant to do, and the document is squeaky clean.


Matthias

On Mon, 23 Jun 2003 09:45:39 +0100, Headless <invalid_address@dna.ie>
wrote:

>Big Bill <kruse@cityscape.co.uk> wrote:
>
>>Try running the html Tidy validator on them and look for
>>warnings.
>
>Tidy is not a validator, it's an HTML checker, and a bad one.
>

There's a difference between a validator and a checker?

BB


>Headless

MFW Britpack www.extreme-positioning.co.uk
There is only one war, and it's not the rich against the poor,
the blacks against the whites, the Federation against the Borg,
or the Democrats versus the Republicans. It's those of us who
aren't complete idiots against those of us who are.

Big Bill <kruse@cityscape.co.uk> wrote:

>>Tidy is not a validator, it's an HTML checker, and a bad one.
>
>There's a difference between a validator and a checker?

A validator checks HTML against the spec as defined in the DTD, HTML
checkers do not.


Headless