Unescaped ampersand in links

use & instead?

[LunaC]

My pages validated as strict untill I removed the outbound tracking links. Now a few are showing validation errors on links with urls that contain &.

Should I edite these urls to use &, is there a better way?

[Demaestro]

I would go with the &

[mcvoid]

I had the same thing when I validated my page. I changed it to & and it validated just fine. I find that it only happens when validating in XHTML Strict.

[Fotiman]

Yes, you should be using & in your URLs. From the HTML spec [w3.org]:

The URI that is constructed when a form is submitted may be used as an anchor-style link (e.g., the href attribute for the A element). Unfortunately, the use of the "&" character to separate form fields interacts with its use in SGML attribute values to delimit character entity references. For example, to use the URI "http://host/?x=1&y=2" as a linking URI, it must be written <A href="http://host/?x=1&#38;y=2"> or <A href="http://host/?x=1&amp;y=2">.

[LunaC]

OK, Thank you very much for your help.

[apprentice]

My StatCounter code which initially contained several unescaped ampersands also gave me validation errors in my 4.01 HTML Strict. After I replaced them with &amp; the validator stopped complaining. I also tested the tracker and it seemed to be working fine, so yes, you are good to replace them.

Regards.