Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on 10/21/07 06:35

Scripsit nice.guy.nige:

> No, there are standards. You can find them for both HTML and CSS at
> http://www.w3.org

No, the only standard on those matters is ISO HTML, and virtually nobody
knows or cares about it.

The W3C is not a standards organization. You can see this e.g. from the fact
that both CSS 1 and CSS 2 are "W3C recommendations", mutually contradictory,
and nobody (at least nobody inside the W3C) takes them seriously any more,
since CSS 2.1 is treated as the "de facto" standard, despite being a draft
that itself declares that it may change without notice at any moment and
that it is inappropriate to cite it except as work in progress. Standards
organizations do foolish things, but not _that_ kind of foolishness.

> The fun thing with CSS comments is that they use the standard C
> comment separators of /* ... */, which lulls you into a false sense
> of security, what with C++, Java, PHP etc also using the // comment
> identifier, but CSS doesn't go with that idea. Maybe it was just me
> who fell for that one...

"Comments considered harmful." (J. Korpela)

Did you know that while IE 7 supports CSS 2 selectors like p + p or
:first-child rather well, it treats comments as elements when deciding
whether such a selector matches a particular element? This proves that some
implementors were clueless or very sloppy, but it also proves that comments
are dangerous in HTML, as in any formal language.

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

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