[Zope] Any alternative to &arg in URL?

Tres Seaver tseaver@palladion.com
Thu, 30 Sep 1999 09:10:35 -0500


John Hermes wrote:

>I am working on a site using both POST and GET
>forms and I use URL args frequently in the target:
>
>action="subfolder/index_html?arg1=spam&arg2=eggs&..."
>
>Using the '&' character in URLs is not legal HTML
>(4.0-strict). Does Zope recognize other arg
>separators besides '&'?  I don't want to give up
>the way Zope parses and places the args into the
>namespace for me.
>
>Any thoughts would be much appreciated!
>
>John Hermes              jhermes@infoglobe.com

W3.org's HTML 4 spec () sez:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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&#38;y=2"> or <A href="http://host/?x=1&amp;y=2">. 

We recommend that HTTP server implementors, and in particular, CGI implementors 
support the use of ";" in place of "&" to save authors the trouble of escaping 
"&" characters in this manner.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I don't see a problem with continuing to use the ampersand in URL's which are
constructed on the fly to be used in a GET request.  The only problem lies in
trying to embed them within an HTML document;  not a common use case.

-- 
================================================================================
Tres Seaver            tseaver@palladion.com      http://www.palladion.com
Palladion Software     Houston, Texas, USA        713-523-6582