将数据放入href安全吗？

Question

I'm wanting to pass data from one php page to another on click, and use that data in populating the linked page. At first I was going to use ajax to do this, but ran into trouble, and then realized it was as easy as placing the data in the href of the link.

My question is, is it safe to place the data directly in the href in this manner? I know that passing the data via the URL (which this ends up doing) is safe, but I heard somewhere (that I can't recall), that placing the data directly in the href of a link can cause problems with web-crawlers and the like.

Is this true? Is there anything else I should worry about in using this method? Or is this the best way for me to send data, unique to each link, to another page on click?

The PHP:

while($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result_pag_data)) { 
    echo "<a target='_blank' href='secondary_imgs.php?imgId=".$row['imgId']."'></a>";
}

Answer 1

There should be no problems with web crawlers as they just follow the links.

There is however a potential security problem in that malicious users can address arbitrary rows in your table by altering the URL string. This may or may not be a problems depending on what the links point to.

If you need to restrict your data to particular users then this is not a good idea, otherwise, its simple and straightforward if it works for you then do it.