Re: how to include an ampersand in an html href using xt and xsl?

[Eric van der Vlist <vdv@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

John,

I wasn't aware of this before you've asked and I have been rather
suspicious first as well...

There shouldn't be any impact on the servers at least for recent
releases of browsers : I have done a quick test with both Netscape 4.7
and IE 5.0 and it looks like they translate the URI before sending it to
the server.

I have **not** tested with old releases or other browsers, but, after
all, we may not have to to post process our generated files !

I have also tested the notation with ";" instead of "&", which is not
translated by the browsers and my Apache 1.3.9 (which is the latest
available release of Apache) doesn't understand it.

My 0,02 euros.

Eric

John Sidlo wrote:
> 
> Eric, thanks for your response. You've confirmed my suspicions/fears.
> 
> To the XSL community:
> In my opinion this is a flaw in the xslt specification. Most (all?)
> existing servers use the ampersand in query string to separate
> parameters, and the xslt spec expressly forbids generating an ampersand
> in an attribute (see section 16.4 of XSL Transformations).  While it is
> fine for the xslt specification to by default require HTML 4.0
> conformance, I believe it should allow 'disable-output-escaping="yes"'
> within an attribute, especially when so many servers and CGI
> implementations require it.
> 
> It seems to me the only choice I have is to post-process the html output
> string to generate href's with ampersand!
> 
> I hasten to add that if I'm wrong about this, I'd love to be corrected
> (even chastised)!
> 

-- 
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Eric van der Vlist                                              Dyomedea

http://www.dyomedea.com                          http://www.ducotede.com
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