Proper mailto: rejected

[RHaworth]

I coded this link:
<a href='mailto:Roger%20W%20Haworth%20<W@RHaworth.net>?subject=W3%20Validator'>
but validator rejects it saying:

Bad value mailto:Roger%20W%20Haworth%20W@RHaworth.net?subject=W3%20Validator for attribute href on element a: Illegal character in scheme data: < is not allowed.

<a href='mailto:Roger%20W%20Haworth%20&#60;W@RHaworth.net&#62;?subject=W3%20Validator'>Try it now!</a>

This a "proper" email address in the format "Plain Name <Name@domain>". Clicking on the link takes me to Outlook Express perfectly happily. I have escaped the <> around the email address as < and > (if I use < and > the error still reports). So why is Validator rejecting it?

[sideshowbarker]

mailto:Roger%20W%20Haworth%20%3CW@RHaworth.net%3E?subject=W3%20Validator

[sideshowbarker]

I have escaped the <> around the email address as < and > (if I use < and > the error still reports).

To escape (encode) particular characters in URLs, you need to percent-encode (aka “URL encode”) them.

So instead of using < and >, you need to %3C and %3E.

The following tables show the percent-encoded representations for some common characters:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percent-encoding#Percent-encoding_reserved_characters
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percent-encoding#Character_data

Reserved characters after percent-encoding

!

#

$

&

'

(

)

*

+

,

/

:

;

=

?

@

[

]

%21

%23

%24

%26

%27

%28

%29

%2A

%2B

%2C

%2F

%3A

%3B

%3D

%3F

%40

%5B

%5D

Common characters after percent-encoding (ASCII or UTF-8 based)

newline

space

"

%

-

.

<

>

\

^

_

`

{

|

}

~

%0A or %0D or %0D%0A

%20

%22

%25

%2D

%2E

%3C

%3E

%5C

%5E

%5F

%60

%7B

%7C

%7D

%7E