[thelist] mailto links & Outlook subjects

[Peter Brunone (EasyListBox.com)]

	Well, kick me in the thyroid and sing about Elvis -- you're
right.  I tested every nuance of your claims, and they were dead on.

	Thanks for taking a sledgehammer to my crusted-over assumptions.

Peter

-----Original Message-----
From: thelist-bounces at lists.evolt.org On Behalf Of Andrew Clover

<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/