[ic] Frustrated with IC 4.8

[Jon Jensen]

On Mon, 17 Sep 2001, Jim Balcom wrote:

> NDO>> Also, READ the TAG REFERENCE in full, and
> NDO>>all other documentation.  I haven't done all the above, I am working on reading
> NDO>>the reference guide, so far I think its written fairly decent.
>
> If you can understand that document, you are a far better person than I am.
>
> The last revision of the document was attempting to document what was
> actually happening, and it was doing it in a manner that is hard to
> understand. When things were found that were ridiculous the documenters
> refused to go back to the programmers to fix it, but rather to simply
> document it.

Jim, I remember the occasion you're talking about. The "programmers" was
me -- and your memory is bad. The snippet you gave had nothing to do with
it. We were discussing this obscure, never-documented, never-used
construct:

<!--[sometag ...]-->

and the parse routine for it. I decided it was better not to change
something that would make only the tiniest theoretical improvement, on a
tag syntax nobody uses, just to make the documentation a little simpler.

Now to your sample snippet:

> (snippet)
> some code and stuff for the page
> more stuff
> [/comment]
> more lines of stuff
> [comment]
> We are giving away money today
> [/comment]
>
> Now, because there is a [/comment] on the page before [comment] the
> [comment] is shut off immediately. To me, this is stupid behavior and needs
> to be corrected. The Akopia employees writing the documentation chose to not
> do anything about it.

I don't know what you're talking about here. When I try that exact
snippet, the only noteworthy effect is that a literal '[/comment]' is
printed after 'more stuff', which is just what I'd expect when there was
no opening [comment] tag to begin with. The real comment container below
properly removes 'We are giving ...' from the output, as it should.

So what would you like it to do? In any case, you have never mentioned it
to me or any other developer, as far as I know.

Jon