[whatwg] Parsing: comment tokenization

Sat Apr 7 15:16:44 PDT 2007

On 7 Apr 2007, at 15:47, Anne van Kesteren wrote:

> On Sat, 07 Apr 2007 14:27:14 +0200, Nicholas Shanks  
> <contact at nickshanks.com> wrote:
>> AFAIK browsers and other HTML clients don't currently treat these as
>> comments, [...]
>
> Well, sorry to say, you got your facts wrong.

*sigh*
I guess that means we're already down the hole. Can we at least stop  
digging?
Even you must (begrudgingly?) admit that "comments" formatted as in  
your original post are not backwards compatible, even if they do  
reflect the state of modern UAs as you say.
In light of this, I suggest instead acknowledging that UA developers  
will need to support it in quirks mode, but instruct authors not to  
use this syntax. Some dire warning about future revocation and ice  
caps melting might help us here.

Of course, the quickest way to get authors to do that would be to fix  
this bug in WinIE, but I don't think Microsoft higher-ups would allow  
that. :-/

On 7 Apr 2007, at 14:00, Kornel Lesiński wrote:

> HTML5 is not an application of SGML and I think it has been proven  
> by now that it doesn't make sense to keep pretending it is (see  
> story about SGML comment in Acid2).

Yeah, I'm aware of that, the vendor complaints and subsequent change  
in Hixie's stance.
I was careful in my previous post not to say "compatible with" or  
"application of" but use "conversion to" for exactly this reason.
I don't believe I am 'pretending' anything. Just stating that  
diverging further from SGML for No Good Reason is pointless. (And  
yes, supporting a few odd websites that do this already counts as not  
a Good Reason, websites can always be fixed!)

But also I think the scope of the original Acid2 furore was  
different, it was a case of dropping adherence to the SGML compatible  
syntax:
<!-- first comment --
   -- another comment -->
to something more like:  token("<!--"); CDATA; token("-->")

On a related matter, does anyone know if WinIE correctly supports  
comments inside tags other than those that begin "<!--" ?
e.g:

<!DOCTYPE html [
<!ENTITY nbhy CDATA "‑" -- non-breaking hyphen -->
]>
<object
     foo="bar"    -- this does foobar stuff --
     bish="bosh"  -- this hits people over the head --
     bash="bush"  -- this elects a democrat --
 >

- Nicholas.
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