Re: Comment Declarations

Daniel W. Connolly (connolly@beach.w3.org)
Thu, 1 Jun 95 22:09:46 EDT

In message <9505311656.AA05052@trystero.art.com>, Joe English writes:
>> |
>> |To include comments in an HTML document, use a comment declaration. A
>> |comment declaration consists of `<!' followed by zero or more comments
>> |followed by `>'. Each comment starts with `--' and includes all text
>> |up to and including the next occurrence of `--'. In a comment
>> |declaration, white space is allowed after each comment, but not before
>> |the first comment. The entire comment declaration is ignored.
>
>That's the best description I've seen so far.
>
>I would suggest adding a note about where comment declarations
>are legal, though (i.e., only in content, not in tags or other
>markup), and possibly mentioning that comments may appear
>inside other markup declarations in the DTD.

I don't think this is necessary, given this:

|2.2. HTML Lexical Syntax
[...]
| A complete discussion of SGML parsing, e.g. the mapping of a
| sequence of characters to a sequence of tags and data, is
| left to the SGML standard[SGML]. This section is only a
| summary.

I've never seen users try to stick comments inside tags or anything
like that, and DTD syntax is no worry: this document is not about how
to read/write SGML DTDs.

If you feel strongly about this, let me (and the list*) know.

* I'm getting feedback on these drafts just to me and not to the
list. This is a NO-NO. I don't guarantee to integrate any feedback
that you're not proud enough about to send to the whole list. Besides:
when you send it to the list, it goes in the archive and I like to
scan the archive for outstanding issues.

Dan