Make your pages validate when they include urls with ampersands (&’s) in them

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.

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