Re: Reparsing of comments, escaped text spans, and --!>

Simon Pieters wrote:
> On Fri, 23 May 2008 05:49:19 +0200, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:
> 
>>> Philip` found 128 pages with open "<!--" out of ~130K pages, listed in
>>> http://philip.html5.org/data/pages-with-unclosed-comments.txt . I looked
>>> through the first 82 pages.
> 
>>> Also found during this research was that a lot of pages use --!> and
>>> expect it to close the comment. --!> closes comments in WebKit and
>>> Gecko. We'll probably make --!> close comments given this data.
>>
>> IE doesn't close on --!>, so I haven't changed this.
> 
> But IE reparses, so the pages mostly work in IE thanks to the reparse.
> 
> We are still finding pages that break because they expect --!> to close 
> the comment. Please change HTML5 here to make more Web pages work.
> 

I agree. I looked at some pages that currently trigger reparsing in IE 
(the list of urls was compiled by Philip and is available at [1]). 
Assuming my analysis was correct, 129 of (the unscripted, live versions 
of) those pages have an unterminated comment in the current parsing 
algorithm, of which 20 are fixed by making --!> end comments (matches 
Gecko, Webkit, IE, Opera quirks) and 23 are fixed by making --\s*> 
terminate comments (matches Gecko, IE, Opera quirks). I think HTML 5 
should make both of those cases work to prevent significant 
compatibility regressions.

[1] http://philip.html5.org/data/dotbot-20090424.txt