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

On Wed, 26 Mar 2008, Simon Pieters wrote:
> 
> We were fixing our bugs regarding reparsing, but were a bit scared to 
> fix reparsing of comments and escaped text spans, so I asked in #whatwg 
> if someone could be kind enough to provide some data on the matter...
> 
> 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. 40 of those would work better if we reparse, 
> 1 would work slightly worse, and the rest would be unaffected. This 
> means that about 0.05% of pages would break if we didn't reparse.

Given that reparsing is a security risk, there's no way I'm ever going to 
require (or even allow) this in HTML5.


> 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.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Friday, 23 May 2008 03:49:56 UTC