Comments in markup?

Arnoud (
Mon, 29 Jul 1996 18:56:45 +0200

From: (Arnoud "Galactus" Engelfriet)
Subject: Comments in markup?
Date: Mon, 29 Jul 1996 18:56:45 +0200
Message-ID: <N1O/>

Yesterday I received an e-mail from someone who wanted to know more
about HTML comments. I explained how they worked, and she then came
up with the idea that you could embed comments in HTML tags then:
<A HREF="foo" -- A link to foo -->click here</A> would, according to
her, be technically legal. Webtechs[0] didn't agree.

When I tested this myself, I found out I couldn't use any SGML constructs
other than DOCTYPES or comment elements in an HTML document when feeding
it to the Webtechs validator. Is there a reason for this? Why would an
SGML parser allow <!-- foobar --> but not <!ENTITY foobar ...>, both of
which are valid SGML constructs?

[0] <URL:>
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