Yes, this kind of bug will be common. The chance of changing this
in XMl-lang is very small. One of the bogosities that make SGML parsers
hard to write is that entity references are nontrivial to recognize. When
I'm teaching XMl, it's *so nice* to be able to say: all markup without
exception starts with '<' or '&', and anything that starts with
'<' or '&', without exception, is markup. End of story. Users like it,
programmers like it.
So, what's the solution? If all else fails, a postprocessor that
takes <a href="/cgi-bin/frobnisticate?a1=mona;a2=lisa;a3=overdrive">
and changes the ;'s to &'s on the way off to the server?
-Tim