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having an ampersand like href="http://www.auscert.org.au/render.html?it=2260&cid=1920 immediately causes 7 errors. There is an "explain" link that takes me to http://validator.w3.org/docs/errors.html#bad-entity, but even though it's second <li> talks about using &, its worrying about the missing semicolon in the end and the true reason (http://www.htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/problems.html#amp) is never mentioned.
Target 0.6.2; this wants a little thinking to avoid "optimizing" exclusively on one of the possible reasons for this error message. At a minimum this error explanation should include the WDG link and make clear the situation with & in URIs.
Retargetting to 0.7; this fits nicely in with the general framework for improving error messages planned for that timeframe.
Nominating for review for the 0.7.0 release.
AFAIK this was addressed in 0.6.5 with the "error message explanations" feature
Re-opening, as this is the current error message: "Line 221, column 8: character "&" is the first character of a delimiter but occurred as data <h2>Foo & Bar</h2> If you wish to include the "<" character in your output, you should escape it as "<". Another possibility is that you forgot to close quotes in a previous tag." That was not an attempt to add a < character - validator recognised it as a & character, then gave the info for the < character.
(In reply to comment #5) > Re-opening, as this is the current error message: > > "Line 221, column 8: character "&" is the first character of a delimiter but > occurred as data > > <h2>Foo & Bar</h2> Strictly speaking, You are talking about the warning message for ampersand as data, *not* the error message for an ampersand in a URI. As such, your comment is more relevant to Bug 798 than this one. If you want to suggest a better warning message for ampersand as data, I would recommend sending a message to the public list www-validator@w3.org - or opening a new issue on bugzilla.