Re: Bugreport on comments
Gisle Aas (gisle@aas.no)
05 Dec 1997 11:50:38 +0100
hellmuth@ira.uka.de writes:
> I have just looked up the HTML2.0 definition of comments, which seems to have
> changed in HTML4.0 to disallow multiple comments between markup delimiters
> (step in the right direction IMHO, comments shouldn't be syntactical beasts
> that break silently when you make a mistake). So, when 4.0 will be out, you
> are in a dilemma anyway: If you try to be 4.0 compliant, programms using libwww
> can't parse older texts correctly (or is something wrong with my
> reasoning here).
I don't think I read the HTML4.0 comment definition like you do:
http://www.w3.org/TR/PR-html40/intro/sgmltut.html#h-3.2.4
All it says is that: "A common error is to include a string of
hyphens ("---") within a comment."
It does not say what a parser should do if it encounters them.
> As it stands now, libwww can't parse a lot of texts floating
> on the web, and without telling anyone (how about giving a warning message,
> UNLESS netscape_buggy_comment is true?).
>
> It's no wonder that there are a lot of SGML-challenged users when for example
> O'Reilly's 'HTML: THe definitve Guide' forgets to mention the facts about
> comment use. Suns HotJava browser ignores the standard too, not suprisingly
> since I stumbled over the <--------> comments while loading one of their
> Web-pages. How about renaming netscape_buggy_comment to buggy_comment.
I am thinking about renaming it to strict_sgml_comment() or something
like that and let the default value be 0.
Regards,
Gisle