Re: Correct comment placement

On Thu, 25 Mar 2004, Tantek Çelik wrote:

> > Please note that www-html is a forum for discussing HTML development, not
> > a helpdesk or even a forum for discussing practical authoring problems.
>
> Jukka, if you're going to chastise the use of this forum, you ought to
> provide an alternative, or at least a pointer to document stating the scope
> of this forum, since the name alone of this forum implies any discussion of
> "html" on the "www" is reasonable.

Really? I don't think I have any responsibility to do so, morally or
otherwise. If you think such pointers are necessary, please
provide them instead of asking me to do so. I have no control over the
relevant page at the W3C site, or the welcome message that one gets when
joining the list.

> Perhaps valid, but not practical.

There's no "perhaps" about the validity issue, and you know that.

> >> I am putting the comments between the doctype ad the html tags, and I
> >> would like to have know if this is correct.
>
> That too is valid, and should work fine.

There's usually little point in adding comments to HTML markup. Either the
information should be presented as metainformation, or comments on odd
markup should be made unnecessary by making the markup less odd.
In fact, it would probably be better if HTML had no comment conventions,
but it's probably too late to change this.

> > doctype sniffing
> > itself is theoretically absurd
>
> but works quite well in practice.

Even if it were true (it surely isn't), it would be no excuse.

> > and pragmatically a horrendous mess.
>
> where's the mess?

I thought this had been discussed at nauseam, and I have no intentions of
raising a discussion that won't change anything, but the fact is that
doctype sniffing is poorly documented and not known to most authors, and
it is carried out in incompatible ways by browsers.

> and do you have an alternative proposal to DOCTYPE switching that you can
> demonstrate to be better?

I have no alternative proposal to creating the problem that doctype
sniffing creates, but if you wanted to make browsers operate in different
modes when rendering HTML, there's the old version attribute in <html> and
the possibility of introducing a parameter for the media type.

-- 
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

Received on Thursday, 25 March 2004 14:05:16 UTC