[whatwg] Consecutive hyphen-minus characters in comments/in ACE-strings of IDNs

[Anne van Kesteren]

On Fri, 07 Jan 2011 02:10:26 +0100, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
> The question, I guess, is which of the following do we think is more
> important:
>
>  * Helping authors not write HTML markup that might be hard to convert to
>    XML, and helping authors avoid nesting comments accidentally, by
>    flagging "--" sequences in comments
>
>  * Getting out of the way of authors who want to put "--" sequences in
>    comments, e.g. because they use "--" as a long dash (as I do all the
>    time!), or because they want to comment out punycoded URLs.
>
> Currently the spec assumes the former is more important. Personally, I
> think the latter is rather more useful, but then I use "--" as long
> dashes all the time! When this was last studied, the weight of argument
> was on the stricter "disallow --" side of things, presumably.
>
> I'm open to changing this back; does anyone else have an opinion on this?

I think the main concern back then was compatibility with legacy browsers.  
I would not mind easing the restriction as relatively soon all browsers  
will have HTML5 comment parsing. And given that <!-- and --> are clear  
delimiters disallowing -- does not make a whole lot of sense.


-- 
Anne van Kesteren
http://annevankesteren.nl/