Late this afternoon I came across an undocumented bug in Netscape 6. As bugs go this was a pretty nasty one to track down. Sparing you the sordid details, it boils down to the way NS6 handles malformed HTML comment tags when using a Transitional Doctype definition.
Purists might say that if your code is malformed, you should expect it to fail in some manner or other. However, the rest of us coders have grown accustomed to some degree of leniancy when it comes to a browser’s interpretation of what is and what is not malformed.
If you look at the source of this site you will notice that all the pages use the Transitional DTD as seen below:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd”>
The malformed code in this particular instace was the following:
<!—- Begin DYNAMIC CONTENT 2.0 —->
Nothing terribly wrong with that right? Wrong At least as far as Netscape’s parsing engine under the Loose DTD is concerned. As it turns out, NS6 will consider this malformed because the number of “-” in the closing tag is larger than 3.
