Handling bad comments

[Andrew Burday]

On Thu, 3 Aug 1995, Christian Neuss wrote:

> 
> I must disagree.. handling comments correctly (like OmniWeb does) allows
> for "commenting out" not only text, but complete HTML code. An example:
> <!-- this is the <I> text </I> as it was before -->
> won't be displayed at all.
> 
> By accepting every ">" as the end of comment, the text will be displayed
> like this:
> as it was before -->

A good point.  I guess the ideal solution would be something like this: 
After a "<!--", look for a "-->".  If one is found before the next "<!-- "
or the end of the page (whichever comes first), assume that's the end of
the comment.  If no "-->" is found, look for the ">" that immediately
succeeds the the "<!--", and use that ">" for the end of the comment. 
That would prevent someone from accidentally commenting out their entire
document, as in the case I cited.  It would also allow for the correct use
of comments that Christian cites.  It would even work in perverse cases,
e.g. if someone had two comments on a page, with the *second* correctly
terminated but not the first.  But it would prevent you from putting
comments around your comments.  If you didn't try to handle the perverse
case -- ie, you searched only to the end of the document, not to the next
"<!--" -- then you could embed comments in comments.  I imagine the scheme
could be complicated to handle *both* embedded comments and perverse
cases, too.  You'd have to try to match close-comment-tags with
open-comment-tags.  But I don't know how many such complications would be
worth the programmers' effort. 

> need. Does anybody know how browsers other then NutScape behave?

This recently came up on the lynx-dev list.  Apparently lynx treats 
isolated ">"s as ends of comments.  (Don't think I've checked recently 
myself, but if that's what the programmers say...)

Best,

Andrew Burday
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andy at philo.mcgill.ca                    http://godel.philo.mcgill.ca/
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