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

[Ian Hickson]

On Fri, 7 Jan 2011, Anne van Kesteren wrote:
> 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.

On Fri, 7 Jan 2011, Henri Sivonen wrote:
> 
> I'd prefer to keep the cases where infoset coercion has to kick in for 
> valid documents to a minimum. (But I might be optimizing the wrong thing 
> if the larger population doesn't care about infosets.)

I've left this as-is for now.

I think on the long term it might make sense to change the spec to allow 
"--" in a comment but disallow "<!--". But let's leave this for now.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'