Links with "&" don't validate XHTML 1.0 strict

**JazKillingJoke** · Dec 14, 2008 16:33

Hi

I am using the following doctype

Code:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en" xml:lang="en">

When I validate my page this link for a map to mapquest does not validate, all the ampersands return an error. Not sure how to fix this.

http://www.mapquest.com/maps?form=directions&2pn=Applebee%27s%20Neighborhood%20Grill&2a=3690%20Cascade%20Rd%20SW&2c=Atlanta&2s=GA&2z=30331&2y=US&2l=33.723633&2g=-84.509215&2id=3819698"

Here is the message from the validator:

Line 52, Column 59: character "&" is the first character of a delimiter but occurred as data.
…http://www.mapquest.com/maps?form=di...20Grill✉
This message may appear in several cases:

You tried to include the "<" character in your page: you should escape it as "<"
You used an unescaped ampersand "&": this may be valid in some contexts, but it is recommended to use "&", which is always safe.
Another possibility is that you forgot to close quotes in a previous tag.

Thanks a lot

Patrick