[thelist] mailto links & Outlook subjects

Andrew Clover and-evolt at doxdesk.com
Fri Dec 17 18:18:18 CST 2004


<peter at easylistbox.com> wrote:

> You don't have to encode your ampersands in the querystring.

Not so. All HTML attributes, whether they contain URLs or anything else, 
*must* escape ampersands (and less-than, and whichever quote character 
is in use). href="foo?a=b&c=d" is invalid HTML and non-well-formed XML. 
It will work in the average browser, until one of your parameters has 
the same name as an HTML entity (eg. ?page=1&sect=3) at which point 
it'll all go skewiff.

 > In fact, if you do, you'll probably get some unwanted characters in
 > your subject line.

No current browser has failed to unescape the ampersands in URLs for, 
oh, a decade. Tim's code is correct.

Now, whether mailto: links with query strings are to be recommended is 
another story...!

-- 
Andrew Clover
mailto:and at doxdesk.com
http://www.doxdesk.com/


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