[whatwg] Comment Syntax and Parsing

Tue Jan 24 15:47:38 PST 2006

Ian Hickson wrote:
> On Wed, 25 Jan 2006, Lachlan Hunt wrote:
>> Ian Hickson wrote:
>>> On Tue, 24 Jan 2006, Lachlan Hunt wrote:
>>>> PA<!-- > FAIL -- >SS               | " > FAIL "               | PASS
>>> Disagree. The terminator should be "-->", not "-- S* >". I don't see any
>>> good reason to have "-- S* >".
>> I was working on the assumption that the comment would end at the first 
>> occurance of '>' while in the comment end state, but that whitespace 
>> would be ignored while searching for it.  Several browsers already 
>> handle it like that including Mozilla, Opera and Safari (except in 
>> Opera, the comment contained " > FAIL -").  Although IE, OmniWeb and 
>> iCab failed.
> 
> Really? In my testing, browsers didn't reliably do this. Were you testing 
> standards mode or quirks mode? Did you have the potential to be hitting 
> unexpected-EOF-reparse behaviour, or was it definitely the first-parse 
> behaviour?

I tested the following in the live dom viewer using Firefox 1.5.0.1 Win 
and Mac, Opera 8.5/Mac, Opera 9 Win and Mac, Safari 2.0.3, IE6, OmniWeb 
5.1.2 and iCab 3.0.1.

<!DOCTYPE html>
PA<!-- > FAIL -- >SS

Browser   | Comment     | Rendered
----------|-------------|---------------
Firefox   | " > FAIL "  | PASS
O 8.5/Mac | " > FAIL -" | PASS
O 9.0/Mac | " > FAIL "  | PASS
O 9.0/Win | " > FAIL "  | PASS
Safari    | (not shown) | PASS
IE6       | (not shown) | PA FAIL -- >SS
iCab      | (not shown) | PA FAIL -- >SS
OmniWeb   | (not shown) | PA FAIL -- >SS

(The live dom viewer didn't work for OmniWeb, I just used an HTML file 
instead)

-- 
Lachlan Hunt
http://lachy.id.au/