XHTML strict validation & is not allowed in a URL

[Barry Books]

I started validating my site as XHTML strict and ran into a problem I
did not expect. The W3C validator reports

# Warning  Line 9 column 109: cannot generate system identifier for
general entity "service".

...Acumera/app?page=AcuVigil%3AMGStatus&service=page"/>

With the following explanation:

http://www.htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/problems.html#amp

Ampersands (&'s) in URLs

Another common error occurs when including a URL which contains an
ampersand ("&"):

<!-- This is invalid! --> <a
href="foo.cgi?chapter=1&section=2&copy=3&lang=en">...</a>

This example generates an error for "unknown entity section" because
the "&" is assumed to begin an entity reference. Browsers often
recover safely from this kind of error, but real problems do occur in
some cases. In this example, many browsers correctly convert &copy=3
to (c)=3, which may cause the link to fail. Since &lang; is the HTML
entity for the left-pointing angle bracket, some browsers also convert
&lang=en to 〈=en. And one old browser even finds the entity &sect;,
converting &section=2 to §ion=2.

To avoid problems with both validators and browsers, always use &amp;
in place of & when writing URLs in HTML:

<a href="foo.cgi?chapter=1&amp;section=2&amp;copy=3&amp;lang=en">...</a>

Note that replacing & with &amp; is only done when writing the URL in
HTML, where "&" is a special character (along with "<" and ">"). When
writing the same URL in a plain text email message or in the location
bar of your browser, you would use "&" and not "&amp;". With HTML, the
browser translates "&amp;" to "&" so the Web server would only see "&"
and not "&amp;" in the query string of the request.


This surprised me because every url I've ever seen has an & in it.
Does this seem correct and if so I guess Tapestry should support a
separator other than &

Barry