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Paul Johnson

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Jun 23, 2009, 10:39:19 AM6/23/09
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For some time, I've been helping out where I can at Douglas County Court
Appointed Special Advocates. They help kids in foster care.

I've run into a perplexing problem. They have their website in a CMS
system on www.orgsites.com and the page renders fine in Internet
Explorer, but in Firefox a middle section is missing.

I wonder if you wouldn't browse and let me know what you think:

http://www.orgsites.com/ks/douglascountycasa/

Toward the bottom, there should be a big-ish table with 2 rows and 2
columns:

2009 C4C Playhouse Tour: Playhouse Tickets:

Casa4CASA Playhouse Drawing Party Drawing Party Highlights


On Firefox, the first row does not show. I believe it "disappears"
because Firefox is not handling the comment markup. It disappears after
the comment that looks like this:

<!-- ------------------------------ #### 2-COL 1 #### -->

Internet Explorer "correctly" separates the following html from the comments, but Firefox (at least on my system, Firefox 3.11) sees a big block of comments, all the way down to this:

<!-- ------------------------------#### 2-COL 2 #### -->


The CMS on that site is very restrictive. Users can have a banner, an then they have a set of pre-defined sections in which they can put stuff.


I've fiddled the markup in the CMS on the server lot and lots, but see
no relief.

I hate computers. Sometimes.

Paul Johnson
KU

Aaron Brown

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Jun 23, 2009, 10:51:40 AM6/23/09
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Paul Johnson wrote:
> On Firefox, the first row does not show. I believe it "disappears"
> because Firefox is not handling the comment markup. It disappears after
> the comment that looks like this:
>
> <!-- ------------------------------ #### 2-COL 1 #### -->
>
> Internet Explorer "correctly" separates the following html from the comments, but Firefox (at least on my system, Firefox 3.11) sees a big block of comments, all the way down to this:
>
> <!-- ------------------------------#### 2-COL 2 #### -->

You're right - that's the problem. IE is doing it wrong, they're not
obeying the spec (go figure). Here's the reference that HTML Tidy
showed me about it, quoted from the w3.org page:

http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/intro/sgmltut.html#h-3.2.4
==================================================================
3.2.4 Comments

HTML comments have the following syntax:

<!-- this is a comment -->
<!-- and so is this one,
which occupies more than one line -->

White space is not permitted between the markup declaration open
delimiter("<!") and the comment open delimiter ("--"), but is permitted
between the comment close delimiter ("--") and the markup declaration
close delimiter (">"). A common error is to include a string of hyphens
("---") within a comment. Authors should avoid putting two or more
adjacent hyphens inside comments.

Information that appears between comments has no special meaning (e.g.,
character references are not interpreted as such).

Note that comments are markup.
==================================================================

I recommend using ==== instead of ---- when you want a visual separator
in your HTML code. I don't know what Chrome/Safari (aka WebKit)
browsers will do with it, but I suspect they'll follow the spec and hide
the commented parts of the table just like Firefox does. Your only good
solution is to update the comments in the code.

- Aaron

--
Aaron Brown :: aa...@thebrownproject.com :: www.thebrownproject.com

Jonathan Otsuka

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Jun 23, 2009, 12:06:35 PM6/23/09
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Browsershots is a neat project you might look into, to see how other
browsers react. It usually doesn't take long to get the results back.

Jonathan



On Jun 23, 2009, at 9:51 AM, Aaron Brown <aa...@thebrownproject.com>
wrote:

Eric Wilhelm

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Jun 23, 2009, 1:49:49 PM6/23/09
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# from Aaron Brown
# on Tuesday 23 June 2009 07:51:

> I don't know what Chrome/Safari (aka WebKit)
>browsers will do with it, but I suspect they'll follow the spec and
> hide the commented parts of the table just like Firefox does.

konqueror and arora both treat the whole <!-- --blah --> as a comment.

--Eric
--
"If you dig it, it's yours."
--An old village poet (via Al Pacino)
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http://scratchcomputing.com
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