Re: HTML comments

On Mon, 11 Nov 1996, Jon Ribbens wrote:

> Is there any particular reason that libwww doesn't make
> any effort to deal with HTML comments?
> 
> Lynx appears to be based upon libwww, and it does comments
> (albeit incorrectly).

Can you substantiate that claim that "Lynx does comments incorrectly"?
I believe that you are either wrong, or your observation is based
on an old version of Lynx or on unfamiliarity with the functions bound
(by default) to the <`> and <'> keys:

'           HISTORICAL    toggle historical vs. valid/minimal comment parsing
`           MINIMAL       toggle minimal vs. valid comment parsing

That Lynx has to support various versions of "comment parsing", and the
fact that "valid comment parsing" is not the recommended installation 
default, is not Lynx's fault.  It just tries to cope with realities
inflicted on the Web by other, "major" browsers.

(Further comments on this should probably go to lynx-dev@sig.net.)
 
In any case, the "libwww" part of Lynx code is based on an earlier
version of the reference library, but has changed so much since then
that forming opinions about the Library based upon Lynx's behaviour
(or the other way around) can be only misleading.

> I thought the idea of libwww was to have some kind of
> reference implementation? It's not much use if it's
> not right ;-).

I think "reference implementation" means something different from
"plug and play" ;)

   Klaus

Received on Monday, 11 November 1996 15:44:24 UTC