212606 - garageboy.com - page content not shown because of invalid HTML comment syntax

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Tech Evangelism Graveyard :: English US, defect, P3)

Description

[Jeppe Oland]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030516 Mozilla Firebird/0.6
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030516 Mozilla Firebird/0.6

Should be a lot of text for each item in the list.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.

Actual Results:  
Only see the beginning of the page.

Expected Results:  
Shown the whole page

Comment 1

[Bill Mason]

It's because all the rest of the page content comes after this invalid comment:

<!----------------------------------Beginning of the
FAQ-------------------------------------------->

The broken comment syntax causes Mozilla, in trying to parse what the comment
should be, to comment out the rest of the page.  Comments cannot contain --'s in
the body of the comment itself.

You should write the webmaster and let them know.  You can refer them to the
document at http://devedge.netscape.com/viewsource/2003/comments/ for guidance.

->TE

Comment 2

[Bill Mason]

Updating summary.

Comment 3

[Jeppe Oland]

I wrote the page author.
However other browsers (IE) deal with this problem just fine ...

Comment 4

[Bill Mason]

Mozilla will also forgive the bad syntax in old documents that Mozilla renders
in quirks mode.  However, this page has a malformed HTML 4.01 DOCTYPE.  Unknown
DOCTYPEs (which this one essentially is, since it's not one of the 3 valid HTML
4.01 DOCTYPEs) are treated as calling for standards mode rendering by Mozilla. 
In standards mode invalid comment syntax is not forgiven by Mozilla.

The fact that IE or other browsers ignore the bad comment syntax are bugs in
those browsers.

Comment 5

[Jeppe Oland]

I guess the decision is between a 100% compliant and pedantic Browser ... or a
forgiving useable one ;-)

Comment 6

[Bill Mason]

Well, even if the author had gotten the DOCTYPE right he'd have the same
problem.  All the 4.01 DOCTYPEs put Mozilla into a non-quirks rendering mode.

Either the HTML should be valid (it's not that far for this page to reach validity):
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.garageboy.com%2Fbmw%2Fbrakefaq.html&doctype=HTML+4.01+Transitional&charset=iso-8859-1+%28Western+Europe%29&ss=1&verbose=1

...or take the DOCTYPE off and just be a quirky document.

Comment 7

[Daniel.S]

Site's fixed.