[whatwg] Ending comments with --!>

[Maciej Stachowiak]

On Jun 27, 2008, at 12:13 AM, Adam Barth wrote:

> Ian explained to me on IRC that IE and Opera are consuming the entire
> document as a comment and reparsing for > (i.e., --!> is not treated
> specially).  That is supported by the following test case:
>
> http://crypto.stanford.edu/~abarth/research/html5/comments/bang- 
> gt.html
>
> Safari and Firefox contain explicit code for detecting --!> (as
> demonstrated by the above test case).  In Safari, the code was
> introduced in
>
> http://trac.webkit.org/changeset/4103
>
> In Firefox, the code was introduced in
>
> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=110544
>
> As far as I can tell, neither checkin explains why this behavior was  
> added.

Hyatt's comment on the WebKit checkin says it was to match other  
browsers (presumably Mozilla).

Regards,
Maciej

>
>
> Adam
>
>
> On Thu, Jun 26, 2008 at 10:30 PM, Adam Barth <whatwg at adambarth.com>  
> wrote:
>> Internet Explorer 7, Firefox 3, Safari 3.1, and Opera 9.5 accept --!>
>> as an alternate comment terminator to the usual -->
>>
>> http://crypto.stanford.edu/~abarth/research/html5/comments/strange-ending.html
>>
>> In Internet Explorer 7 and Opera 9.5, if the document later contains
>> the usual comment terminator, then that character sequence terminates
>> the comment instead:
>>
>> http://crypto.stanford.edu/~abarth/research/html5/comments/strange-ending-with-real-ending.html
>> http://crypto.stanford.edu/~abarth/research/html5/comments/strange-ending-with-later-comment.html
>>
>> Firefox 3 and Safari 3.1 do not appear to exhibit this behavior.
>>
>> (Interestingly, the syntax highlighter in vim suggests the document
>> will be parsed as in Firefox and Safari, no doubt contributing to
>> author confusion.)
>>
>> Adam
>>