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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-21T15:53:33+00:00

In a HTML 4.01 Transitional document, is it a breach of the standard to

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In a HTML 4.01 Transitional document, is it a breach of the standard to specify a link href without escaping space characters?

For instance this link

<a href="http://example.com/some page.html">Some page</a>

as opposed to

<a href="http://example.com/some%20page.html">Some page</a>

I can’t easily work it out from http://www.w3.org/TR/html40/struct/links.html#h-12.1.3 , maybe one of you folks can enlighten?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    In a HTML 4.01 Transitional document, is it a breach of the standard to specify a link href without escaping space characters?

    Yes. The href attribute, takes a URI as defined in RFC1630, RFC1738 and RFC1808.

    RFC1738 says:

    The space
    character is unsafe because significant spaces may disappear and
    insignificant spaces may be introduced when URLs are transcribed or
    typeset or subjected to the treatment of word-processing programs.

    and

    All unsafe characters must always be encoded within a URL.

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