Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

["Susan LaBarre" <idodesign AT earthlink.net>]

Thanks for the clarification, Steve. Many years ago, when I learned HTML, we
were told it didn't matter how many dashes were inside a comment tag.

I've been purposely making them extra long so they'd be easier to spot by
administrators who were maintaining pages I'd created. Duh...

Well, now I know...

Thanks again for all your patience.

Susan

-----Original Message-----
From: internetworkers-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org
[mailto:internetworkers-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org]On Behalf Of Steven
Champeon
Sent: Tuesday, December 13, 2005 11:35 AM
To: Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/
Subject: Re: [internetworkers] Need Help Troubleshooting HTML Page


on Tue, Dec 13, 2005 at 11:16:15AM -0500, Susan LaBarre wrote:
> I think I'm really confused. Aren't xhtml comments written the same way as
> comments in html? I've been commenting pages for many years... <!---- all
> the same way ---->

You've been doing it wrong all these years, then, as I and Scott tried
to point out. What's changed is that you're actually using XHTML, a
somewhat stricter form of HTML that new browsers try to treat properly
instead of in the forgiving mode you may be accustomed to.

Don't fret, just fix it. Some of us went through similar problems when
Netscape finally fixed its broken browser in 1994 - they had been just
dealing with badly formatted anchors like this (note the missing end
quote on the attribute value):

 <a href="http://foo.example.com>click here!</a>

and when they fixed their parser, a lot of people's links broke. In the
end, though, it was the right move. And a lot of pages got a little better
as a result. It's progress.

> When I took my Dreamweaver couse months ago, the instructor advised us to
> begin using only xhtml tagging. But she didn't say anything about writing
> the comment tags differently. Can someone please show me the way I should
> write a comment that will pass the validator?

<!-- this is a comment -->

Note the two dashes at each end. That's all you need, and that's all you
should use. More than that is not only incorrect, it's wasteful.

<!----------- this is actually several comments and will break the
page ---->

You may want to go back and read Scott's post and the page he sent.

Steve

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