XHTML Strict validation help

need it

[Tonearm]

I'm confused about a couple things I'm getting from the w3c XHTML 1.0 Strict validator.

These errors:

1. cannot generate system identifier for general entity "prefcode"
2. general entity "prefcode" not defined and no default entity
3. reference not terminated by REFC delimiter
4. reference to external entity in attribute value
5. reference to entity "prefcode" for which no system identifier could be generated
6. entity was defined here

are caused by this:

<a href="http://www.domain.com/page.jsp?aid=01234&prefcode=ABC"

This error:

1. document type does not allow element "input" here

is caused by this:
<div>
<div>
<div>
<form action="action" method="post">
<input type="hidden" name="name" value="value" />
<input name="name" size="15" type="text" />
<input type="submit" value="Submit" />
</form>
</div>
</div>
</div>

Can anyone help clear this up?

[Hester]

The link needs to have the ampersand written as "&" plus "amp;".

[Tonearm]

Nice, thanks Hester.

One other thing is I had to remove the target attribute of the anchor tag. How can I open something in a new window without using Javascript?

[RonPK]

> How can I open something in a new window without using Javascript?

You can't, AFAIK.

A solution is to use JavaScript to add the target attribute, i.e. without using window.open().

[encyclo]

How can I open something in a new window without using Javascript?

You can't - either in XHTML 1.0 Strict or HTML 4.01 Strict. Obviously, it will still work if you use

target="_blank"

, but if you want it to validate, then you should use a transitional doctype.

This earlier thread [webmasterworld.com] might help.

[Tonearm]

Thanks guys. I fixed the <input> problem by wrapping my input tags in divs. The only problem there is IE wants to add about a pixel of vertical space for each div. Anything I can do about that?

[encyclo]

From your original markup sample above, you don't need to add divs around each

input

, you just need to move the

<form>

and

</form>

tags outside of the containing divs.

[g1smd]

Why have you got three nested divs anyway?

That looks like needless code bloat.