I'm using an '&' symbol with HTML5 and UTF-8 in my site's <title>. Google shows the ampersand fine on its SERPs, as do all the browsers in their titles.
http://validator.w3.org is giving me this:
& did not start a character reference. (& probably should have been escaped as &.)
Do I really need to do &?
I'm not fussed about my pages validating for the sake of validating, but I'm curious to hear people's opinions on this and if it's important and why.
Yes. Just as the error said, in HTML, attributes are #PCDATA meaning they're parsed. This means you can use character entities in the attributes. Using & by itself is wrong and if not for lenient browsers and the fact that this is HTML not XHTML, would break the parsing. Just escape it as & and everything would be fine.
HTML5 allows you to leave it unescaped, but only when the data that follows does not look like a valid character reference. However, it's better just to escape all instances of this symbol than worry about which ones should be and which ones don't need to be.
Keep this point in mind; if you're not escaping & to &, it's bad enough for data that you create (where the code could very well be invalid), you might also not be escaping tag delimiters, which is a huge problem for user-submitted data, which could very well lead to HTML and script injection, cookie stealing and other exploits.
Please just escape your code. It will save you a lot of trouble in the future.
Validation aside, the fact remains that encoding certain characters is important to an HTML document so that it can render properly and safely as a web page.
Encoding & as & under all circumstances, for me, is an easier rule to live by, reducing the likelihood of errors and failures.
Compare the following: which is easier? Which is easier to bugger up?
Methodology 1
Write some content which includes ampersand characters.
Encode them all.
Methodology 2
(with a grain of salt, please ;) )
Write some content which includes ampersand characters.
On a case-by-case basis, look at each ampersand. Determine if:
It is isolated, and as such unambiguously an ampersand. eg. volt & amp > In that case don't bother encoding it.
It is not isolated, but you feel it is nonetheless unambiguous, as the resulting entity does not exist and will never exist since the entity list could never evolve. E.g., amp&volt >. In that case, don't bother encoding it.
It is not isolated, and ambiguous. E.g., volt& > Encode it.
??
HTML5 rules are different from HTML4. It's not required in HTML5 - unless the ampersand looks like it starts a parameter name. "©=2" is still a problem, for example, since © is the copyright symbol.
However it seems to me that it's harder work to decide to encode or not to encode depending on the following text. So the easiest path is probably to encode all the time.
I think this has turned into more of a question of "why follow the spec when browser's don't care." Here is my generalized answer:
Standards are not a "present" thing. They are a "future" thing. If we, as developers, follow web standards, then browser vendors are more likely to correctly implement those standards, and we move closer to a completely interoperable web, where CSS hacks, feature detection, and browser detection are not necessary. Where we don't have to figure out why our layouts break in a particular browser, or how to work around that.
Specifically, if HTML5 does not require using & in your specific situation, and you're using an HTML5 doctype (and also expecting your users to be using HTML5-compliant browsers), then there is no reason to do it.
Well, if it comes from user input then absolutely yes, for obvious reasons. Think if this very website didn't do it: the title of this question would show up as Do I really need to encode ‘&’ as ‘&’?
If it's just something like echo '<title>Dolce & Gabbana</title>'; then strictly speaking you don't have to. It would be better, but if you don't, no user will notice the difference.
Could you show us what your title actually is? When I submit
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<title>Dolce & Gabbana</title>
<body>
<p>Am I allowed loose & mpersands?</p>
</body>
</html>
to http://validator.w3.org/ - explicitly asking it to use the experimental HTML 5 mode - it has no complaints about the &s...
In HTML, a & marks the begin of a reference, either of a character reference or of an entity reference. From that point on, the parser expects either a # denoting a character reference, or an entity name denoting an entity reference, both followed by a ;. That’s the normal behavior.
But if the reference name or just the reference opening & is followed by a white space or other delimiters like ", ', <, >, &, the ending ; and even a reference to represent a plain, & can be omitted:
<p title="&">foo & bar</p>
<p title="&">foo & bar</p>
<p title="&">foo & bar</p>
Only in these cases can the ending ; or even the reference itself be omitted (at least in HTML 4). I think HTML 5 requires the ending ;.
But the specification recommends to always use a reference like the character reference & or the entity reference & to avoid confusion:
Authors should use "&" (ASCII decimal 38) instead of "&" to avoid confusion with the beginning of a character reference (entity reference open delimiter). Authors should also use "&" in attribute values since character references are allowed within CDATA attribute values.
Update (March 2020): The W3C validator no longer complains about escaping URLs.
I was checking why image URLs need escaping and hence tried it in https://validator.w3.org. The explanation is pretty nice. It highlights that even URLs need to be escaped. [PS: I guess it will be unescaped when it's consumed since URLs need &. Can anyone clarify?]
<img alt="" src="foo?bar=qut&qux=fop" />
An entity reference was found in the document, but there is no
reference by that name defined. Often this is caused by misspelling
the reference name, unencoded ampersands, or by leaving off the
trailing semicolon (;). The most common cause of this error is
unencoded ampersands in URLs as described by the WDG in "Ampersands in
URLs". Entity references start with an ampersand (&) and end with a
semicolon (;). If you want to use a literal ampersand in your document
you must encode it as "&" (even inside URLs!). Be careful to end
entity references with a semicolon or your entity reference may get
interpreted in connection with the following text. Also keep in mind
that named entity references are case-sensitive; &Aelig; and æ
are different characters. If this error appears in some markup
generated by PHP's session handling code, this article has
explanations and solutions to your problem.
It depends on the likelihood of a semicolon ending up near your &, causing it to display something quite different.
For example, when dealing with input from users (say, if you include the user-provided subject of a forum post in your title tags), you never know where they might be putting random semicolons, and it might randomly display strange entities. So always escape in that situation.
For your own static HTML content, sure, you could skip it, but it's so trivial to include proper escaping, that there's no good reason to avoid it.
If the user passes it to you, or it will wind up in a URL, you need to escape it.
If it appears in static text on a page? All browsers will get this one right either way, and you don't worry much about it, since it will work.
Yes, you should try to serve valid code if possible.
Most browsers will silently correct this error, but there is a problem with relying on the error handling in the browsers. There is no standard for how to handle incorrect code, so it's up to each browser vendor to try to figure out what to do with each error, and the results may vary.
Some examples where browsers are likely to react differently is if you put elements inside a table but outside the table cells, or if you nest links inside each other.
For your specific example it's not likely to cause any problems, but error correction in the browser might for example cause the browser to change from standards compliant mode into quirks mode, which could make your layout break down completely.
So, you should correct errors like this in the code, if not for anything else so to keep the error list in the validator short, so that you can spot more serious problems.
A couple of years ago, we got a report that one of our web apps wasn't displaying correctly in Firefox. It turned out that the page contained a tag that looked like
<div style="..." ... style="...">
When faced with a repeated style attribute, Internet Explorer combines both of the styles, while Firefox only uses one of them, hence the different behavior. I changed the tag to
<div style="...; ..." ...>
and sure enough, it fixed the problem! The moral of the story is that browsers have more consistent handling of valid HTML than of invalid HTML. So, fix your damn markup already! (Or use HTML Tidy to fix it.)
If & is used in HTML then you should escape it.
If & is used in JavaScript strings, e.g., an alert('This & that'); or document.href, you don't need to use it.
If you're using document.write then you should use it, e.g. document.write(<p>this & that</p>).
If you're really talking about the static text
<title>Foo & Bar</title>
stored in some file on the hard disk and served directly by a server, then yes: it probably doesn't need to be escaped.
However, since there is very little HTML content nowadays that's completely static, I'll add the following disclaimer that assumes that the HTML content is generated from some other source (database content, user input, web service call result, legacy API result, ...):
If you don't escape a simple &, then chances are you also don't escape a & or a or <b> or <script src="http://attacker.com/evil.js"> or any other invalid text. That would mean that you are at best displaying your content wrongly and more likely are suspectible to XSS attacks.
In other words: when you're already checking and escaping the other more problematic cases, then there's almost no reason to leave the not-totally-broken-but-still-somewhat-fishy standalone-& unescaped.
The link has a fairly good example of when and why you may need to escape & to &
https://jsfiddle.net/vh2h7usk/1/
Interestingly, I had to escape the character in order to represent it properly in my answer here. If I were to use the built-in code sample option (from the answer panel), I can just type in & and it appears as it should. But if I were to manually use the <code></code> element, then I have to escape in order to represent it correctly :)
Related
I am revising some XHTML files authored by another party. As part of this effort, I am doing some bulk editing via Linq to XML.
I've just noticed that some of the original source XHTML files contain the " HTML entity in text nodes within those files. For instance:
<p>Greeting: "Hello, World!"</p>
And that when recovering the XHTML text via XElement.ToString(), the " entities are being replaced by plain double-quotes:
<p>Greeting: "Hello, World!"</p>
Question: Can anyone tell me what the motivation might have been for the original author to use the " entities instead of plain double-quotes? Did those entities serve a purpose which I don't fully appreciate? Or, were they truly unnecessary as I suspect?
I do understand that " would be necessary in certain contexts, such as when there is a need to place a double-quote within an HTML attribute. For instance:
<a href="/images/hello_world.jpg" alt="Greeting: "Hello, World!"">
Greeting</a>
It is impossible, and unnecessary, to know the motivation for using " in element content, but possible motives include: misunderstanding of HTML rules; use of software that generates such code (probably because its author thought it was “safer”); and misunderstanding of the meaning of ": many people seem to think it produces “smart quotes” (they apparently never looked at the actual results).
Anyway, there is never any need to use " in element content in HTML (XHTML or any other HTML version). There is nothing in any HTML specification that would assign any special meaning to the plain character " there.
As the question says, it has its role in attribute values, but even in them, it is mostly simpler to just use single quotes as delimiters if the value contains a double quote, e.g. alt='Greeting: "Hello, World!"' or, if you are allowed to correct errors in natural language texts, to use proper quotation marks, e.g. alt="Greeting: “Hello, World!”"
Reason #1
There was a point where buggy/lazy implementations of HTML/XHTML renderers were more common than those that got it right. Many years ago, I regularly encountered rendering problems in mainstream browsers resulting from the use of unencoded quote chars in regular text content of HTML/XHTML documents. Though the HTML spec has never disallowed use of these chars in text content, it became fairly standard practice to encode them anyway, so that non-spec-compliant browsers and other processors would handle them more gracefully. As a result, many "old-timers" may still do this reflexively. It is not incorrect, though it is now probably unnecessary, unless you're targeting some very archaic platforms.
Reason #2
When HTML content is generated dynamically, for example, by populating an HTML template with simple string values from a database, it's necessary to encode each value before embedding it in the generated content. Some common server-side languages provided a single function for this purpose, which simply encoded all chars that might be invalid in some context within an HTML document. Notably, PHP's htmlspecialchars() function is one such example. Though there are optional arguments to htmlspecialchars() that will cause it to ignore quotes, those arguments were (and are) rarely used by authors of basic template-driven systems. The result is that all "special chars" are encoded everywhere they occur in the generated HTML, without regard for the context in which they occur. Again, this is not incorrect, it's simply unnecessary.
In my experience it may be the result of auto-generation by a string-based tools, where the author did not understand the rules of HTML.
When some developers generate HTML without the use of special XML-oriented tools, they may try to be sure the resulting HTML is valid by taking the approach that everything must be escaped.
Referring to your example, the reason why every occurrence of " is represented by " could be because using that approach, you can safely use such "special" characters in both attributes and values.
Another motivation I've seen is where people believe, "We must explicitly show that our symbols are not part of the syntax." Whereas, valid HTML can be created by using the proper string-manipulation tools, see the previous paragraph again.
Here is some pseudo-code loosely based on C#, although it is preferred to use valid methods and tools:
public class HtmlAndXmlWriter
{
private string Escape(string badString)
{
return badString.Replace("&", "&").Replace("\"", """).Replace("'", "'").Replace(">", ">").Replace("<", "<");
}
public string GetHtmlFromOutObject(Object obj)
{
return "<div class='type_" + Escape(obj.Type) + "'>" + Escape(obj.Value) + "</div>";
}
}
It's really very common to see such approaches taken to generate HTML.
As other answers pointed out, it is most likely generated by some tool.
But if I were the original author of the file, my answer would be: Consistency.
If I am not allowed to put double quotes in my attributes, why put them in the element's content ? Why do these specs always have these exceptional cases ..
If I had to write the HTML spec, I would say All double quotes need to be encoded. Done.
Today it is like In attribute values we need to encode double quotes, except when the attribute value itself is defined by single quotes. In the content of elements, double quotes can be, but are not required to be, encoded. (And I am surely forgetting some cases here).
Double quotes are a keyword of the spec, encode them.
Lesser/greater than are a keyword of the spec, encode them. etc..
It is likely because they used a single function for escaping attributes and text nodes. & doesn't do any harm so why complicate your code and make it more error-prone by having two escaping functions and having to pick between them?
I'm using an '&' symbol with HTML5 and UTF-8 in my site's <title>. Google shows the ampersand fine on its SERPs, as do all the browsers in their titles.
http://validator.w3.org is giving me this:
& did not start a character reference. (& probably should have been escaped as &.)
Do I really need to do &?
I'm not fussed about my pages validating for the sake of validating, but I'm curious to hear people's opinions on this and if it's important and why.
Yes. Just as the error said, in HTML, attributes are #PCDATA meaning they're parsed. This means you can use character entities in the attributes. Using & by itself is wrong and if not for lenient browsers and the fact that this is HTML not XHTML, would break the parsing. Just escape it as & and everything would be fine.
HTML5 allows you to leave it unescaped, but only when the data that follows does not look like a valid character reference. However, it's better just to escape all instances of this symbol than worry about which ones should be and which ones don't need to be.
Keep this point in mind; if you're not escaping & to &, it's bad enough for data that you create (where the code could very well be invalid), you might also not be escaping tag delimiters, which is a huge problem for user-submitted data, which could very well lead to HTML and script injection, cookie stealing and other exploits.
Please just escape your code. It will save you a lot of trouble in the future.
Validation aside, the fact remains that encoding certain characters is important to an HTML document so that it can render properly and safely as a web page.
Encoding & as & under all circumstances, for me, is an easier rule to live by, reducing the likelihood of errors and failures.
Compare the following: which is easier? Which is easier to bugger up?
Methodology 1
Write some content which includes ampersand characters.
Encode them all.
Methodology 2
(with a grain of salt, please ;) )
Write some content which includes ampersand characters.
On a case-by-case basis, look at each ampersand. Determine if:
It is isolated, and as such unambiguously an ampersand. eg. volt & amp > In that case don't bother encoding it.
It is not isolated, but you feel it is nonetheless unambiguous, as the resulting entity does not exist and will never exist since the entity list could never evolve. E.g., amp&volt >. In that case, don't bother encoding it.
It is not isolated, and ambiguous. E.g., volt& > Encode it.
??
HTML5 rules are different from HTML4. It's not required in HTML5 - unless the ampersand looks like it starts a parameter name. "©=2" is still a problem, for example, since © is the copyright symbol.
However it seems to me that it's harder work to decide to encode or not to encode depending on the following text. So the easiest path is probably to encode all the time.
I think this has turned into more of a question of "why follow the spec when browser's don't care." Here is my generalized answer:
Standards are not a "present" thing. They are a "future" thing. If we, as developers, follow web standards, then browser vendors are more likely to correctly implement those standards, and we move closer to a completely interoperable web, where CSS hacks, feature detection, and browser detection are not necessary. Where we don't have to figure out why our layouts break in a particular browser, or how to work around that.
Specifically, if HTML5 does not require using & in your specific situation, and you're using an HTML5 doctype (and also expecting your users to be using HTML5-compliant browsers), then there is no reason to do it.
Well, if it comes from user input then absolutely yes, for obvious reasons. Think if this very website didn't do it: the title of this question would show up as Do I really need to encode ‘&’ as ‘&’?
If it's just something like echo '<title>Dolce & Gabbana</title>'; then strictly speaking you don't have to. It would be better, but if you don't, no user will notice the difference.
Could you show us what your title actually is? When I submit
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<title>Dolce & Gabbana</title>
<body>
<p>Am I allowed loose & mpersands?</p>
</body>
</html>
to http://validator.w3.org/ - explicitly asking it to use the experimental HTML 5 mode - it has no complaints about the &s...
In HTML, a & marks the begin of a reference, either of a character reference or of an entity reference. From that point on, the parser expects either a # denoting a character reference, or an entity name denoting an entity reference, both followed by a ;. That’s the normal behavior.
But if the reference name or just the reference opening & is followed by a white space or other delimiters like ", ', <, >, &, the ending ; and even a reference to represent a plain, & can be omitted:
<p title="&">foo & bar</p>
<p title="&">foo & bar</p>
<p title="&">foo & bar</p>
Only in these cases can the ending ; or even the reference itself be omitted (at least in HTML 4). I think HTML 5 requires the ending ;.
But the specification recommends to always use a reference like the character reference & or the entity reference & to avoid confusion:
Authors should use "&" (ASCII decimal 38) instead of "&" to avoid confusion with the beginning of a character reference (entity reference open delimiter). Authors should also use "&" in attribute values since character references are allowed within CDATA attribute values.
Update (March 2020): The W3C validator no longer complains about escaping URLs.
I was checking why image URLs need escaping and hence tried it in https://validator.w3.org. The explanation is pretty nice. It highlights that even URLs need to be escaped. [PS: I guess it will be unescaped when it's consumed since URLs need &. Can anyone clarify?]
<img alt="" src="foo?bar=qut&qux=fop" />
An entity reference was found in the document, but there is no
reference by that name defined. Often this is caused by misspelling
the reference name, unencoded ampersands, or by leaving off the
trailing semicolon (;). The most common cause of this error is
unencoded ampersands in URLs as described by the WDG in "Ampersands in
URLs". Entity references start with an ampersand (&) and end with a
semicolon (;). If you want to use a literal ampersand in your document
you must encode it as "&" (even inside URLs!). Be careful to end
entity references with a semicolon or your entity reference may get
interpreted in connection with the following text. Also keep in mind
that named entity references are case-sensitive; &Aelig; and æ
are different characters. If this error appears in some markup
generated by PHP's session handling code, this article has
explanations and solutions to your problem.
It depends on the likelihood of a semicolon ending up near your &, causing it to display something quite different.
For example, when dealing with input from users (say, if you include the user-provided subject of a forum post in your title tags), you never know where they might be putting random semicolons, and it might randomly display strange entities. So always escape in that situation.
For your own static HTML content, sure, you could skip it, but it's so trivial to include proper escaping, that there's no good reason to avoid it.
If the user passes it to you, or it will wind up in a URL, you need to escape it.
If it appears in static text on a page? All browsers will get this one right either way, and you don't worry much about it, since it will work.
Yes, you should try to serve valid code if possible.
Most browsers will silently correct this error, but there is a problem with relying on the error handling in the browsers. There is no standard for how to handle incorrect code, so it's up to each browser vendor to try to figure out what to do with each error, and the results may vary.
Some examples where browsers are likely to react differently is if you put elements inside a table but outside the table cells, or if you nest links inside each other.
For your specific example it's not likely to cause any problems, but error correction in the browser might for example cause the browser to change from standards compliant mode into quirks mode, which could make your layout break down completely.
So, you should correct errors like this in the code, if not for anything else so to keep the error list in the validator short, so that you can spot more serious problems.
A couple of years ago, we got a report that one of our web apps wasn't displaying correctly in Firefox. It turned out that the page contained a tag that looked like
<div style="..." ... style="...">
When faced with a repeated style attribute, Internet Explorer combines both of the styles, while Firefox only uses one of them, hence the different behavior. I changed the tag to
<div style="...; ..." ...>
and sure enough, it fixed the problem! The moral of the story is that browsers have more consistent handling of valid HTML than of invalid HTML. So, fix your damn markup already! (Or use HTML Tidy to fix it.)
If & is used in HTML then you should escape it.
If & is used in JavaScript strings, e.g., an alert('This & that'); or document.href, you don't need to use it.
If you're using document.write then you should use it, e.g. document.write(<p>this & that</p>).
If you're really talking about the static text
<title>Foo & Bar</title>
stored in some file on the hard disk and served directly by a server, then yes: it probably doesn't need to be escaped.
However, since there is very little HTML content nowadays that's completely static, I'll add the following disclaimer that assumes that the HTML content is generated from some other source (database content, user input, web service call result, legacy API result, ...):
If you don't escape a simple &, then chances are you also don't escape a & or a or <b> or <script src="http://attacker.com/evil.js"> or any other invalid text. That would mean that you are at best displaying your content wrongly and more likely are suspectible to XSS attacks.
In other words: when you're already checking and escaping the other more problematic cases, then there's almost no reason to leave the not-totally-broken-but-still-somewhat-fishy standalone-& unescaped.
The link has a fairly good example of when and why you may need to escape & to &
https://jsfiddle.net/vh2h7usk/1/
Interestingly, I had to escape the character in order to represent it properly in my answer here. If I were to use the built-in code sample option (from the answer panel), I can just type in & and it appears as it should. But if I were to manually use the <code></code> element, then I have to escape in order to represent it correctly :)
When encoding possibly unsafe data, is there a reason to encode >?
It validates either way.
The browser interprets the same either way, (In the cases of attr="data", attr='data', <tag>data</tag>)
I think the reasons somebody would do this are
To simplify regex based tag removal. <[^>]+>? (rare)
Non-quoted strings attr=data. :-o (not happening!)
Aesthetics in the code. (so what?)
Am I missing anything?
Strictly speaking, to prevent HTML injection, you need only encode < as <.
If user input is going to be put in an attribute, also encode " as ".
If you're doing things right and using properly quoted attributes, you don't need to worry about >. However, if you're not certain of this you should encode it just for peace of mind - it won't do any harm.
The HTML4 specification in its section 5.3.2 says that
authors should use ">" (ASCII decimal 62) in text instead of ">"
so I believe you should encode the greater > sign as > (because you should obey the standards).
Current browsers' HTML parsers have no problems with uquoted >s
However, unfortunately, using regular expressions to "parse" HTML in JS is pretty common. (example: Ext.util.Format.stripTags). Also poorly written command line tools, IDEs, or Java classes etc. may not be sophisticated enough to determine the limiter of an opening tag.
So, you may run into problems with code like this:
<script data-usercontent=">malicious();//"></script>
(Note how the syntax highlighter treats this snippet!)
Always
This is to prevent XSS injections (through users using any of your forms to submit raw HTML or javascript). By escaping your output, the browser knows not to parse or execute any of it - only display it as text.
This may feel like less of an issue if you're not dealing with dynamic output based on user input, however it's important to at least understand, if not to make a good habit.
Yes, because if signs were not encoded, this allows xss on forms social media and many other because a attacker can use <script> tag. If you parse the signs the browser would not execute it but instead show the sign.
Encoding html chars is always a delicate job. You should always encode what needs to be encoded and always use standards. Using double quotes is standard, and even quotes inside double quotes should be encoded. ENCODE always. Imagine something like this
<div> this is my text an img></div>
Probably the img> will be parsed from the browser as an image tag. Browsers always try to resolve unclosed tags or quotes. As basile says use standards, otherwise you could have unexpected results without understanding the source of errors.
just realized that html symbols like:
&
will be also recognized by browser WITHOUT
;
I had problem because of that:
¤t
was replaced with
¤t
can you clarify - why?
Because any & in HTML should be encoded as &. So any & on its own will be interpreted as the start of a HTML entity and browsers attempt error correction (the parser may attempt to interpret the entity if a character falls outside of its allowable sequence, such as the space character).
Whenever you use a & in your HTML, encode it as &.
Some named character references are, for backward compatibility reasons, recognised without needing a trailing semicolon. ¤ is one of them.
A full list of named character references, which shows those that don't need a trailing semicolon is given here: https://www.w3.org/TR/html51/syntax.html#named-character-references
Browsers try hard to make sense of garbage when they can. There's no rule that says they should do this, or that they have to, or even that it's a good idea. But if some browsers do this, then they just do.
I have always been very confused with URL/HTML Escaping. More recently I looked deeper into it. Then looking at the PHP Docs for urlencode
$query_string = 'foo=' . urlencode($foo) . '&bar=' . urlencode($bar);
echo '<a href="mycgi?' . htmlentities($query_string) . '">';
I then realized that theres & in most query strings that seems like should be escaped. But it seems to work without escaping. I wonder why, and if its actually required.
Escaping & into & is required in HTML, but it works in most browsers anyway. If it wouldn't, 90% of the Internet would break. :) It still is good style to escape ampersands, and it is required for the document to pass validation.
See this W3C document for some good background why (the text focuses on a specific behaviour of PHP, but that doesn't really matter): Ampersands, PHP Sessions and Valid HTML. Money quote (emphasis mine):
In order to display reserved characters HTML and XHTML provide a mechanism called character references. The syntax of these is:
an ampersand
a "code" for the referenced character
a semicolon
For example, the "less than" character is represented as <.
Giving the ampersand special meaning makes it, like <, a reserved character, so it also needs to be represented by an entity for it to be used in a document - &
You're right.
Inside of an HTML document, the ampersand character (&) is not allowed, except when specifying an entitiy (such as &).
Therefore, code such as <a href='mycgi?foo=1&bar=2'> is invalid HTML. It should throw an error if you run it through a validator.
Most (all?) browsers will cope with it without an error though. There's no ambiguity here, so it will work.
However, it is still a good idea to convert them into entities anyway, because there is always the possibility of an ambiguity creeping in - for example, if you have a parameter in your URL named amp instead of bar, how would the browser deal with that? It's not quite as clear cut. So you should convert them all to entities to avoid any future issues, even if you don't have any now.