Re: Comments in HTML (fwd)

Once upon a time S.N.Brodie@ecs.soton.ac.uk shaped the electrons to say...
>The problem is that browsers have to terminate comments at the first '>'
>beacuse, IIRC, a very early draft of the HTML 2 documentation contained a
>misprint and browser authors accepted any > to terminate a comment, which
>users then used to terminate comments, which browser authors now have to
>support.

IMHO - bullshit.  There is no reason you have to support it.

NS 2.0 and up does not.  MS 3.0 doesn't from what I've seen, but I can't
comment on 2.0 off hand.  The new AOL browser does not.

It is *wrong* and WILL BREAK valid comments.  Any browser that supports it
is miserably broken and I will recommend to anyone using it that they
drop it.

>As a browser author, what am I supposed to do if users complain to me that
>my browser is broken, when all I am doing is implementing the comment
>correctly?

What any proper software author does - point them at the spec and correct
*their* mistake.

Implementing mistakes *deliberately* is poor design, *especially* when the
BREAK THE SPEC!

-MZ
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Received on Tuesday, 11 June 1996 14:53:03 UTC