> > > Who, BTW, firmly agrees with other posters in that using
> > comments as
> > > start-tags and end-tags is a Really Bad Idea.
> >
> > Who, BTW, hadn't looked too closely at what was being done
> > (shame on MS),
>
> I'm curious, where exactly is the bad practice that calls for shame on
> Microsoft's behalf? Since when was placing comments in an XML file a bad
> thing?
From Dominica's post:
> The file I'm working with is a MS .NETFramework system file under
> C:\WINNT\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.0.3705\CONFIG called machine.config.
> It's an XML file. It uses comments to separate sections of
configurations.
The comments in the XML may have been put there for human-legibility, but
they've certainly got a meaning that machines may want to get at, hence
Dominica's question. The comments in this thread have been pretty unanimous
in condemming the use of XML comments to demarcate regions of the data for
processing. Maybe 'shame' was too strong - perhaps better just to suggest
this gets refactored before the final release.
Cheers,
Danny.
