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Search engines and the '&' character

Answer 1

A:

In my opinion, a hypen '-' works better. Nobody's gonna search with an ampersand symbol anyway.

Ruel 2010-09-29 08:27:45

Answer 2

+1 A:

run you page through http://validator.w3.org/ and follow the suggestions

Grumpy 2010-09-29 08:28:59

Answer 3

A:

The & symbol is invalid in HTML except as part of an entity (such as &).

That kinda answers your question -- your first example is invalid HTML, so you should be using the second.

Most browsers will cope with the first example, as there's no ambiguity, but you should still be using the entity code if you're aiming to produce good code.

Spudley 2010-09-29 08:33:19

-1 You’re wrong. It is valid in this case.

Gumbo 2010-09-29 08:38:50

@Gumbo - the w3c validator disagrees with you. (assuming strict mode, as per the question)

Spudley 2010-09-29 08:50:30

Invalid in HTML4, valid in HTML5.

Matthew Wilson 2010-09-29 09:00:37

bobince 2010-09-29 09:09:45

@Spudley: It is valid. Just try it on your own using the [W3C Validator in fragment mode](http://validator.w3.org/#validate_by_input+with_options): It selects Strict automatically and the only error is that `title` is not allowed in the context (since it’s only a fragment).

Gumbo 2010-09-29 09:36:38

@Gumbo (and others) - okay, I saw 'strict' in the doctype in the question and assumed 'xhtml'. My bad. In strict xhtml, the validator does indeed throw it as an error. For other doctypes, it's valid.... but still better to use the entity.

Spudley 2010-09-29 09:43:44

Answer 4

+2 A:

In this case both & and even just & are valid as the latter is followed by a whitespace and thus cannot be confused with a reference open delimiter.

But the HTML 4 specification recommends to use & to avoid ambiguity:

Authors should use "&" (ASCII decimal 38) instead of "&" to avoid confusion with the beginning of a character reference (entity reference open delimiter). Authors should also use "&" in attribute values since character references are allowed within CDATA attribute values.

See my answer on Do I really need to encode '&' as '&'? for further information.

Gumbo 2010-09-29 08:37:42

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