Dynamic Links

his may be a CSS question, but it's the XHTML not validating that's giving me a problem.
I'm working with the most out-dated shopping cart software (Click Cart Pro) ever and I'm trying to get it to validate XHTML 1.0 Transitional.
All the XHTML I've supplied is good and validates fine, but where I'm falling short at the moment is with the linking.

ClickCart Pro - by default - spits out HTML from 1996, and the links are supplied with ampersands - not the XHTML character entity "&".

Par l'exemple:
Code:

<a href="http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/;... etc.

I'm wondering if having this XHTML not validating correctly will break my CSS layout at all? I can't see how it would, but ye never know...

I'm fixing it as we speak, but I'm just wanting to know why my layout's going t*ts up when the rest of my XHTML and my CSS validates fine.

Thanks

The ampersands shouldn't have any effect on the rest of your layout.

You could easily open the file in notepad and do a find and replace for all of the ampersands...but they shouldn't affect anything as it is now.Good Luck!!

The validation of your xhtml does not have to do with the layout. Well it does but not the way you are thinking, you can have a valid xhtml document and the layout a mess, while being a fine and professional design.And you can have a document that does not validate for a simple mistake, but that will not change the layout itself, the validation is for knowing that you did a good code and that it will be easier to stick to cross-browser solutions and help a cross-browser layout too. But that does not affect the way its shown, becouse if your document does not validate it means that something is wrong in your markup and that will be the trouble itself, apart from the validation.But an error like this is will not affect the markup becouse the error would be about an anchor, not an actual div position or something. In fact, this is not an error, the ampersand used in links must be like that, you cannot use a & entity in links becouse its code. The entitys are used for writting the text itself, not the markup rules, so you can have "&" in the href attribute becouse its part of the code, so things like this produces a text output only, not the code itself:ó produces a text output= ?ñ produces a text output = ?" produces a text output = "And so on, but you can not, for example, write &quot in the markup like this:<a href="location/&quot>Text output for the actual link</a>That above is wrong, but this is correct:<a href="location/">Text output for the "Actual Link"</a>Hope this helps you...