Re: Comment syntax

On Mon, Aug 27, 2012 at 5:04 PM, Greg Houston <gregory.houston@gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm amazed after all these years I haven't accidentally realized I
> could comment out a single property with //. Every time I start to do
> it, which is often, I tell myself, "Ope, can't do that". If using //
> as an actual single line comment proved to break too much existing
> content, rather than bless the accidental and incomplete
> "functionality" // currently has, I would rather see something like
> /// used that actually does what coders expect from a single line
> comment, which is to comment out everything on that line.

Sure, coming up with something else as a "to end of line" comment
would work, but it would lose much of the reason for wanting it in the
first place - to match up with C and JS.

> Just on a side note and I'll drop out of this conversation, using //
> to comment out a property is obviously a CSS hack, and one that I know
> I've never seen documented. In general does supporting hacks fall into
> the scope of backward compatibility?

No, backwards compat is solely and completely about supporting
*reality*.  Regardless of whether something is valid or invalid, if
it's *used* on the web, and changing it would break things, we're less
likely to do it, because we want to be able to display old content,
and old content is often "frozen" and won't change.

Forgetting about reality and thinking that speccing is about creating
rules for an ideal world is a common failure mode for specs. ^_^
Specs exist solely to reduce the cost of implementing things - without
them, you have to reverse-engineer everything yourself.

~TJ

Received on Tuesday, 28 August 2012 00:09:48 UTC