does href attribute in a tags need to be encoded?

[pauldenize]

I had a web link like the following

 

<a href="someref?param1=123&param2=xyz">

 

It works fine but when validated - I get

 

general entity "param2" not defined and no default entity

 

note: in my example param2 is double_urlencoded = so looks more like param2=%252Fxyz)

 

Nothing I found says the whole parameter should be encoded

 

[Ingolme]

What's wrong is the &. It thinks it's an HTML entity. Your document is probably using the XHTML doctype. In HTML it's valid to have loose ampersands.

Use an HTML entity to encode the & and you won't get any more warnings.

<a href="someref?param1=123&param2=xyz">

 

Yes, the URL will continue to work properly because the entity is parsed before the URL is used.