a comment on comments (meta-comment comment?)

   I'm sorry that we are trying to disallow "--" in comments. No browser
vendor has implemented the standard correctly in this regard, because it is
too unnatural to fly in the internet. Some of us -- I am one! -- are
addicted to em-dashes. This will be a common (and intentional)
mis-implemented feature of XML. --> should be the only string to terminate
a comment and the end of it. In XML the distinction is particularly
unmotivated because we don't even have the (bad) syntactic justification of
multiple comments. We are requiring every XML processor to implement
special code to barf on user input -- where it causes no parsing or
semantic ambiguity. People on the internet at large already think SGML is
stupid. We need not feed their misconceptions.

   -- David

RE delenda est.

_________________________________________
David Durand              dgd@cs.bu.edu  \  david@dynamicDiagrams.com
Boston University Computer Science        \  Sr. Analyst
http://www.cs.bu.edu/students/grads/dgd/   \  Dynamic Diagrams
--------------------------------------------\  http://dynamicDiagrams.com/
MAPA: mapping for the WWW                    \__________________________
http://www.dynamicdiagrams.com/services_map_main.html

Received on Thursday, 17 October 1996 22:48:33 UTC