Why are commas replaced by html code in Meta Description tag

[printerbase]

Why when I put commas in the meta tag description boxes does catalog replace these with the html code ?
e.g.
, becomes &_#_4_4_; without the _

Does this effect how spiders see the tag ?

Thanks

Peter

[Darren]

Hello Peter

I am running this one past our development team. I will keep you posted.

[edwardk]

I got this as well. I took out the commas and just left spacesa nd the bit that actinic put in dissappeared.

Ed

[Darren]

Hello there.

I have had a response from our development team.

They say that as long as the search engine in compliant with HTML 4, then it should decode the description before processing it.

I will include the rest of the response, which is quite technical!

According to the HTML 4 specification, the data of a META tag is of type cdata.

The same document describes cdata as...

--------------------"---------------------
CDATA. For attribute values, this refers to a sequence of characters from the document character set, which may include character entities. User agents should resolve CDATA before further processing of attribute values. The HTML 4.0 specification often places further constraints on the permitted syntax for CDATA attributes.
--------------------"---------------------

This means that characters may be encoded, what this doesn't say is that the commas need to be encoded. Have not been able to find anything that says that commas should or should not be encoded. In Actinic it is done because (I believe) all HTML output is parsed by a common routine which encodes unsafe characters.

I hope this helps