Re: Comments in HTML

smiddleton@nc.acorn.co.uk (Simon Middleton) wrote:

>I have just checked out a copy of Netscape 2 on the Mac and its
>behaviour is quite interesting....
>
>Whilst this is quite clever defensive code it does mean that anyone
>who writes their pages always using  <!-- ... > to delimit quotes will
>have their pages carrying on working and so be unresponsive to requests
>to fix it.

Working till they read the spec, and add a <!-- foo --> comment later
in their document.  Then everything from the first invalid comment to
the later valid comment, inclusive, is taken to be a comment, and part
of the page disappears.

This happened to one of my users some months ago, he just edited an
old document and it suddenly all dissapeared except a bit of
boilerplate at the end.  I looked at it, found the bad comment early
in the text, and realized what had happened.  He'd added a standard
note to the bottom of the page, and the addition had a comment, so
boom, away went the page in netscape.

>Simon Middleton.

Craig Counterman

Received on Wednesday, 12 June 1996 14:24:51 UTC