Can a picture href a website using variables? Or what's this?

[Don Clark]

Hello;

Admittedly, I'm very new to HTML, and this is my first post to any
newsgroup, so please go easy. I was looking at the html code for an email I
received and noted an href statement that looked very unusual. The statement
was:

<a href=3D"http://www.%76%69t%2D% 63%6F.com">
<INPUT TYPE=3D"submit" VALUE=3D"Order Here" style=3D"font-family: Verdana;
color: #3F79C0; ">

The site noted in the html code is: http://www.%76%69t%2D%63%6F.com and
when I cut and paste it directly into my browser address window it actually
resolves to the site http://www.vit-co.com/main.php

Question 1: What does the "3D" mean in html?
Question 2: Are the "%76, etc..." is that a variable of some kind? Can a
variable be used for a host name or part of a host name using an html
statement? (Or is this example above just a bizzare host name and DNS is
forwarding to the other site name?)
Question 3: Can any characters be added to a host name (like the % symbol )
that are later ignored (or stripped away) by the html code just before
sending the request to a DNS server to resolve the name to an IP number?
Kind of like the way the exclamation point comments <!--comment--> in the
html are stripped away and ignored by the browser before it displays the
page.

Thanks,
Don
html newbie

[Stan Brown]

In article <l1N3b.297975$H o3.42410@sccrns c03> in
comp.infosystem s.www.authoring.html, Don Clark <Do******@mchsi .com>
wrote:

Hello;

Admittedly, I'm very new to HTML, and this is my first post to any
newsgroup, so please go easy. I was looking at the html code for an email I
received and noted an href statement that looked very unusual. The statement
was:

<a href=3D"http://www.%76%69t%2D% 63%6F.com">
<INPUT TYPE=3D"submit" VALUE=3D"Order Here" style=3D"font-family: Verdana;
color: #3F79C0; ">
The email was sent to you using an encoding called "quoted-
printable". Q-P changes any 8-bit character into a three-character
sequence comprising an equal sign and a two-digit hex number. For
instance, the acute-accented-e is character 233 (in ISO-8859-1
coding, which most English-language Windows machines use), and 233
decimal is E9 hex, so the sequence =E9 in quoted-printable stands
for an e-with-accute-accent.

Of course if the = sign leads off a 3-character sequence, there has
to be some way to represent the = sign itself. Since it is ASCII
character 61, and 3D is hex for 61 decimal, =3D stands for an equal
sign.

Now if your mailer was set up to interpret quoted-printable, this
would all have been invisible to you. But you might want to suggest
to your correspondent not to set quoted-printable unless they are
actually sending 8-bit characters, which probably they are not.

The codes %xx are "escapes" used in URLs to represent characters
that are not legal in URLs, like space and >. %76 means character
number 76 hex or 118 decimal, which is a lower-case v. There is no
reason to transmit a "v" in a URL in this fashion, other than to
obscure what the URL is.
The site noted in the html code is: http://www.%76%69t%2D%63%6F.com and
when I cut and paste it directly into my browser address window it actually
resolves to the site http://www.vit-co.com/main.php
And now you know why. %69 means lower-case i, and so on.
Question 1: What does the "3D" mean in html?
Nothing whatever. The three-character sequences beginning with the =
sign are part of a mail and news transport protocol (and an
obsolescent one at that), not part of HTML or URLs.
Question 2: Are the "%76, etc..." is that a variable of some kind?
No. For more, see section 2.4 of
http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/cs/Ser...xt/rfc2396.txt
Question 3: Can any characters be added to a host name (like the % symbol )
that are later ignored (or stripped away) by the html code just before
sending the request to a DNS server to resolve the name to an IP number?

I don't understand this question, so let me try to answer it anyway.
:-)

The "%" in URLs is not a character on its own, but the first
character of a three-character escape sequence. Browsers should all
change any escape sequences in a URL into the appropriate single
character. For instance, a URL containing the sequence %7E actually
contains the single character ~, and any browser should make the
change for you.

--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Cortland County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
HTML 4.01 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/
validator: http://validator.w3.org/
CSS 2 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/
validator: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

[Owen Jacobson]

Don Clark wrote:

The statement was:
HTML is not a programming language and therefore does not have
'statements'. It does have elements, delimited by tags.
Question 1: What does the "3D" mean in html?
"=3D" is the 'quoted-printable' representation of the equals sign
("="). I'm going to assume this came out of some spam, because that's
generally where you see that.
Question 2: Are the "%76, etc..." is that a variable of some kind?
%xx is the correct way to escape special characters in a URL. It also
happens to work with non-special characters; in this case the %xx
representations are an attempt at hiding the URL in the message
(possibly as a way of evading spam filters, though I can't say for
sure) which are resolved to the actual characters when your browser
parses the URL.
Question 3: Can any characters be added to a host name (like the %
symbol ) that are later ignored (or stripped away) by the html code
just before sending the request to a DNS server to resolve the name
to an IP number?

No. Why would you want to do this?

(I don't believe you can even put HTML comments inside a string literal
like the href attribute of an A element. I'm presently too busy to
check, however.)

Owen