Re: Comments in HTML (fwd)

MegaZone wrote:
> 
> 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 did not know that Netscape had now stopped supporting it.  If that's
the case then I can follow the standard properly at last.

I've given up following the changes made by Netscape - I don't use it any
more, it takes so long to start up on our workstations.

> 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.

The parser was implemented back in 1994.  At the time, it made me
miserable implementing the ruddy thing (it's controlled by an option).
Frankly I was pissed off at the time having to follow a broken
implementation (Mosaic & Netscape) over the spec.   I haven't had
time to modify it.

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

Which I do.  And they respond by saying that they mailed the page author
who said that "Netscape handles it, so your browser must be broken".  (To
be fair, not absolutely all of the page authors respond that way, just
most of them)

Netscape & Microsoft might be big enough to be able to ignore
user complaints about breaches in the spec - I can't.

-- 
Stewart Brodie, Electronics & Computer Science, Southampton University.
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~snb94r/      http://delenn.ecs.soton.ac.uk/

Received on Tuesday, 11 June 1996 18:36:02 UTC