At some point you will run your web page through the W3C validator and get the error, “unknown entity section”; due to the presence of ampersands (&’s) in page link urls.
The validator assumes that this is an error because it expects an ampersand to be the beginning of an entity.
I had this very problem myself when creating the weblog links for my own CMS. For me the solution was simple; I just get the CMS script to turn all ampersands into their equivalent entities.
Unfortunately it is slightly more work to manually replace all ampersands in a page, but if you want your page to validate it is a chore you will need to attend to:
For all urls in web pages that contain ampersands, i.e., replace each ampersand (&) in urls embedded within your pages, with the equivalent entity & , e.g.,
http://www.mcu.org.uk/showlog.php?weblogid=74&contentid=1
Needs to be modified to,
http://www.mcu.org.uk/showlog.php?weblogid=74&contentid=1
Another validation problems solved.
Tags: html, markup, validation
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Working with non-profits, charities, voluntary and public sector organisations and social enterprises for over 20 years. Jim set up one of the worlds first website accessibility web agencies in the mid 1990s.