URL fails in W3C HTML/XHTML Validation

Question

I use the URL below in my web page in href tag and unfortunatelly whole link fails in W3C HTML/XHTML Validation.

How do I solve this problem?

http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=N+Z&hl=en&hnear=ABC+N4+1,+Jamaica&t=m&z=16

My page includes:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
.
.
.

Reference not terminated by REFC delimiter. - Reference to external entity in attribute value. - An unknown entity has been used. This often happens when &param=value is used instead of &param=value in URL query strings - In HTML the ampersand character (&) is reserved for marking character entities so you should never use raw ampersands in HTML - including ampersands inside URLs. For example, any URL that needs an ampersand should look like: example.com/… — BentCoder
– BentCoder, Commented Oct 26, 2012 at 17:19

unor · Accepted Answer · 2012-10-27 13:34:53Z

5

You'd have to encode the ampersand (&) in URLs with &.

So your URL should look like:

http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=N+Z&hl=en&hnear=ABC+N4+1,+Jamaica&t=m&z=1

See info in HTML 4.01, for example. Also there is web tool which checks for ambiguous ampersands: http://mothereff.in/ampersands

answered Oct 27, 2012 at 13:34

unor

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theprogrammer · Accepted Answer · 2012-10-26 17:23:57Z

2

You should escape/encode the URL.

answered Oct 26, 2012 at 17:23

theprogrammer

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