- From: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
- Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2011 01:55:52 +0000 (UTC)
On Thu, 6 Jan 2011, Glenn Maynard wrote: > On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 8:10 PM, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote: > > ?* Helping authors not write HTML markup that might be hard to convert to > > ? XML, and helping authors avoid nesting comments accidentally, by > > ? flagging "--" sequences in comments > > > > ?* Getting out of the way of authors who want to put "--" sequences in > > ? comments, e.g. because they use "--" as a long dash (as I do all the > > ? time!), or because they want to comment out punycoded URLs. > > > > Currently the spec assumes the former is more important. Personally, I > > think the latter is rather more useful, but then I use "--" as long > > dashes all the time! When this was last studied, the weight of argument > > was on the stricter "disallow --" side of things, presumably. > > I do this, too, and disallowing this in comments would be very annoying. > > This is probably a novice question since it seems too obvious, but > rather than disallowing "--", why not disallow the entire comment > opening token, "<!--"? That wouldn't help with the XML case, which IIRC is the main reason for the current state of affairs here. > This whole thing seems like something that should be left to text > editors, though, not forced. For example, if I enter "/* /* text */" in > a C file in Vim, it highlights the second "/*" in red as a warning. I > don't need the compiler to reject it. The "compiler" here is the browser -- and the browser won't reject "--" in a comment. Only the validator will. The validator is the equivalent of the lint tool in Vim. Conformance requirements are a QA tool, they don't limit what user agents do. -- Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,. Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
Received on Thursday, 6 January 2011 17:55:52 UTC