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

[Aryeh Gregor]

On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 8:10 PM, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
> 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 also use "--" as dash a lot.  I don't think XML compatibility is
significant -- few authors will want to serialize their pages to XML.
(Are there other cases where we warn or error for text/html that
produces a DOM that can't serialize to XML?)  So I'd be in favor of
allowing it.

If we're worried about commenting out comments, then raise a warning
on that.  But I don't think it's a big issue.  In most cases it will
cause some other parse error anyway.

On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 8:55 PM, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
> The "compiler" here is the browser -- and the browser won't reject "--" in
> a comment. Only the validator will. The validator is the equivalent of the
> lint tool in Vim.

Except that it's not unheard of for web authors to be required to
write valid code, because some customers demand it, so it's a little
more weighty than vim syntax highlighting.