email link

& or &amp

[FromBelgium]

What is the correct syntaxt for email link?
Both versions work but:

<a href="mailto:?subject=Interesting site&body=text">
WC3 does not validate
Spider simulator read all content

<a href="mailto:?subject=Interesting site&amps;body=text">
WC3 does validate
Spider simulator stops spidering content after this link

[edited by: FromBelgium at 8:25 pm (utc) on July 11, 2006]

[penders]

You have "&amps;" in your second example above, where it should be &amp;. But then it wouldn't validate with &amps; - so I guess you have it correct in your actual script?!

I would have said it needed to be &amp;, but why would this stop a spider?! Is the anchor tag closed/nested correctly?

[FromBelgium]

Sorry, my code was without "s", only put a typo in this post only. So why would a spider simulator(from summitmedia)stop at:
<a href="mailto:?subject=Interesting site&amp;body=text">

I know that Google indexes the whole page. Could it be a bug in the spider simulator?

[penders]

Do you have a slightly larger snippet of code to have a look at?

[FromBelgium]

I canged some site specific words:

<td class=submenuright>
<a href="mailto:?subject=Interesting site on Widgets&amp;body=They have lots of interesting facts about widgets and step-by-step instructions for making your own widgets http://www.example.com/" class=readmore><img src="pictures/mail.jpg" border=0 alt="mail about widgets"></a>&nbsp;
<a href="mailto:?subject=Interesting site on Widgets&amp;body=They have lots of interesting facts about widgets and step-by-step instructions for making your own widgets http://www.example.com/" class=tellfriend>Tell a friend!</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;
</td>

[penders]

I tried my own test using the code you specified in the first post, as well as the larger code snippet above... and they all seem to run OK through the spider you mention. All links seem to be picked up that occur after the '&amp;' mailto: link which you said was stopping the spider. In fact the spider doesn't seem to mind whether you have just '&' or the correct '&amp;' - it finds everything!

If the spider simulator is still being stopped, I think it must be something else!