Amazon Ads don't validate

not even in W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN

[annej]

What do people do about this? We can't change the code.

[encyclo]

What errors are you getting? Is it just to do with unescaped ampersands or is it more serious than that?

[annej]

It's all
error: unknown entity
or
Warning: net-enabling start-tag; possibly missing required quotes around an attribute value

I guess along with this question does it really matter if a page validates in terms of accessability?

[encyclo]

You should simply swap out all instances of

[b]&[/b]

within the links and replace them with

[b]&[/b]

instead. A lot of affiliate-style links cause validation problems because of unescaped ampersands. It's not so much a modification to the code than a correction. The URL will work the same and it will validate properly.

Does it matter in terms of accessibility? You are required to have valid markup to claim a certain level of accessibility for your site. User agents however shouldn't have too many problems with unescaped ampersands as they are a common occurence on the web. It is always a good idea to fix them, however.

[annej]

Thanks for the info.