- From: Eve L. Maler <elm@arbortext.com>
- Date: Wed, 29 Jan 1997 13:30:04 -0500
- To: W3C SGML Working Group <w3c-sgml-wg@www10.w3.org>
At 10:22 AM 1/29/97 CST, Michael Sperberg-McQueen wrote:
...
>After the TC, XML can remove the prohibition on --, though not the
>prohibition on *--. And there will still be a minor inconvenience in
>that comments will still be unable to nest, though there is no reason,
>given distinct open and close delimiters, to forbid nesting of comments,
>and in practice it would be very convenient to be able to comment out a
>block of text without having to check first to see if it already
>contained any comments. (An IGNORE marked section can be used this way,
>but I persist in the belief that marked sections are not comments, and
>using them this way constitutes markup abuse.)
...
Comments are supposed to be text that's meant for the eyes of source-file
readers, and not legitimate document content that's temporarily not
supposed to be output. "Commenting out" text in various markup languages
is sometimes achieved by "comments" (especially where that's your only
choice) and sometimes by "ignore regions." For example, in troff, you can
use .\" or .ig, but as in SGML, .ig is much more appropriate for both
practical and, uh, philosophical reasons.
So I'd argue the other way around: Comments are not IGNORE marked sections,
and using them to ignore blocks of document content constitutes markup
abuse. So there. :-)
Eve
Received on Wednesday, 29 January 1997 13:32:14 UTC