Uli Wortmann asked about protecting the & in a URL,
obtained via \htmladdnormallink:
> Ross MOORE wrote:
> >
> > > Hello Hans,
> > >
> > > >> \htmlhead{section} {\htmladdnormallink{Guest Book}
> > > >> {http://www2.spoc.ethz.ch/cgi-bin/spoc
> > > >> /ms-guest.pl?file=guest&template=guest/spoc-node13.html"}}
> > > >>
> > > >> However, the special characters get translated into 'garbage'
> > > >> How do I protect them from getting transformed?
Hans Steffani suggested escaping them, e.g.; guest\&template
which converts the & to the entity &
... and the question was raised as to whether this is the correct
thing to do.
> [...]
> > But this is HTML, not XML, and what is one supposed with existing software
> > that does it wrong ?
> > Would someone please check out what the HTML recommendations are,
> > for this situation.
> How about "Ampersands in URI attribute values" at
> http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/appendix/notes.html#h-B.2.2
>
> Hans Braun
Thanks Hans.
Indeed it *is* the correct action, as the first paragraph from
this page recommends:
B.2.2 Ampersands in URI attribute values
The URI that is constructed when a form is submitted may be used as an anchor-style
link (e.g., the href attribute for the A
element). Unfortunately, the use of the "&" character to separate form fields
interacts with its use in SGML attribute values to
delimit character entity references. For example, to use the URI
"http://host/?x=1&y=2" as a linking URI, it must be written <A
href="http://host/?x=1&y=2"> or <A href="http://host/?x=1&y=2">.
So it is up to the program, or cgi-script, receiving the URI
to interpret the entity correctly.
If it is old software that does *not* interpret the entity,
then you'll have to write your own extra post-processing script
to change & back to '&' .
However, this may mean that some browsers will not *send* the
correct URI to the cgi-script, and may even fail to render the
HTML pages correctly.
In short, best advice is to update the cgi-script.
LaTeX2HTML is already doing the best it can.
Hope this helps,
Ross Moore
