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The following stylesheet gives an error when validating using CSS3 profile: a/*test*/b {color: red} It is however valid according to CSS3 selectors grammar (which is normative) and should be interpreted like CSS2's a b { color: red} Note that the CSS3 selectors grammar does not require an explicit whitespace as combinator, it can also be empty. This is a change compared with parsing selectors in CSS2+CSS21 and therefore should be handled properly in the respective CSS level profile.
This was fixed in the latest draft of Selectors (http://www.w3.org/TR/2005/WD-css3-selectors-20051215). The text (both in sections 4 and 8.1) has always said that the "combinator" of a descendant selector must contain white space. The grammar incorrectly allowed empty combinators in the versions until Nov 2001. The example "a/*test*/b" is not a valid selector in CSS3, because two identifiers cannot follow each other without white space or some punctuation between them. There is no difference between CSS level 3 and lower levels in that respect.