--!> comment ends [was: RE: HTML5-warnings - request to publish as next heartbeat WD]

Ian Hickson wrote:

> BTW, Manu, another one I just remember is the comment termination parsing
> rules, specifically whether we should continue to support the --!>/-- >
> comment terminators.

I understand that they should not be considered conforming.  But is
there really any doubt that User Agents should support them for
backwards compatibility?

I can state from experience that there are quite a few apparently
blank pages on archive.org that go back to sanity if "--!>" closes out
a comment.  [Admission:  Some were written by me.]  They obviously
can't be maintained now.  (And several are no longer available from
the original source.)

I would not have remembered these pages if I had not been able to view
them in the browsers of the time.

It would be perfectly fine for a validator to whine, but it would be
best if the pages could still be read -- and would be properly indexed
by search engines using the html5 parsing rules.

-jJ