On Wed, May 22, 2002 at 04:07:25PM -0500, Patrick K. O'Brien wrote:
>Wouldn't the string "©" (with a trailing semicolon) be interpreted as
>the copyright character? In addition, I find the entire Note
>incomprehensible. Is it just me? :-(

Most Web browsers are very forgiving in their HTML parsing, so they
often will infer the trailing semicolon if it isn't present.  Do a
search on Google Groups for "HTML §ion" to find some of the
endless threads in comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html about this.

>In addition, I find the entire Note
>incomprehensible. Is it just me? :-(

It *is* confusing, because there are two levels of quoting going on
here: URL and HTML.  For example, let's say you have a URL with
'action' and 'section' parameters, and you want the section to be the
string 'R&D'.  You'd have to write 'action=search§ion=%s' %
html.url_quote('R&D').  This results in the string
'action=search§ion=R%26D'.  But if you're putting the URL into an
HTML page, it needs to be quoted for HTML properly with html_quote(),
and you get the final HTML text 'action=search&keyword=R%26D'.

--amk