Re: handling of HTML Comments in HTML style element

Bjoern Hoehrmann wrote:
> 
> This is out of scope of the CSS specification. The input to the CSS
> processor is a sequence of characters; the specification of the style

Maybe it should be, but at the moment, it seems to me that it isn't.

> element has to define how to turn the style elements content into a

It does.  It uses basic SGML rules for CDATA or PCDATA, depending on the 
version of HTML (I think all versions that actually have a style element 
use the CDATA rules.

> sequence of characters; parsing of the character sequence then is the
> same as if the same sequence was specified in a separate .css file.
> 

At the moment, it appears that there are rules in the CSS syntax to 
handle the start and end of HTML comments, as a special case to tolerate 
the protection of style elements against browsers that don't understand 
style elements and therefore parse them as PCDATA.

One could say that the browser should strip an initial <-- and a final 
--> before passing the text to style processor, but that appears not to 
be the current formulation.

-- 
David Woolley
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Received on Sunday, 2 September 2007 07:49:36 UTC