Finicky Commenting Code in Topics

[rmdavidson]

I have a topic that is getting a bit long and I want to add each section header in as a comment so I can find things quicker in the code when I need to tweak it there. I used standard HTML/XML commenting format and Flare is yelling at me that my format isn't correct when I use:

Code: Select all

<!-------------------Initializing Enterprise Settings------------------->

It says, "... an XML comment cannot contain '--' , and '-' cannot be the last character." However, I somehow stumbled on the fact that if I use 3 hyphens at the start and 2 hyphens at the end, it takes the comment. Even 3 at the end and it complains.

Code: Select all

<!---Initializing Enterprise Settings-->

Any ideas why?

Thanks,

Robin

[crdmerge]

Bing search on "html comment syntax" results in:

This means that the following are all legal SGML comments:
<!-- Hello -->
<!-- Hello -- -- Hello-->
<!---->
<!------ Hello -->
<!>

Two dashes apparently are the max in the end section, but more are allowed at the start. I've only ever seen two & two, everywhere, however.


Good luck,
Leon

[LTinker68]

Looks like the correct format is <!-- Comment here -->.

[rmdavidson]

It shouldn't matter how many hyphens there are on either end. I've used however many I want to ever since I started with HTML in 1997 so to me this is rather odd.

Robin

[LTinker68]

It looks like it's that way for XHTML. It's more finicky than plain HTML. Why they felt the comment shouldn't have more than two dashes, I don't know, but it sounds like it might be the standard, at least for XHTML.

[RamonS]

When in doubt look at the W3C standard. See here: http://dev.w3.org/html5/markup/syntax.html#comments

Shows that anything other than <!-- at the beginning and --> at the end is not valid. And before someone claims Flare is still broken because it allowed <!--- at the beginning, the third - is considered part of the comment text.

Well possible that some browsers and editors allow other comment markup, but then only because they blatantly ignore the standard - unfortunately way too common.