I've just quickly scanned an article in MSDN May 2007 called Create Advanced Web Applications With Object-Oriented Techniques.
I already know most of the techniques that were included in the article, but I thought it was very well written and very easy to understand for newcomers.  Have a go at it.  Fun Fun.

A colleague of mine was having a problem with this issue yesterday.

If you are passing a URL with its own complex query string  in an HREF tag to a popup (window.open / showModalDialog, etc.), remember to do this:

<a href=”#” onclick=”window.open('foo.aspx?id=1&url=bar.aspx%3fvar1%3dONE%26var2%3dTWO')”>click me</a>

instead of

<a href=”window.open('foo.aspx?id=1&url=bar.aspx%3fvar1%3dONE%26var2%3dTWO')”>click me</a>

In the example above, I am trying to pass url “bar.aspx?var1=ONE&var2=TWO” tofoo.aspx when the popup window is opened.

There seems to be something about how the href tag is handled that when you do the method below (passing window.open...) inside the href tag, you will be guaranteed to lose var2=TWO

Give it a try.  It's weird, but interesting to know nonetheless.