RESOLUTION: I now understand what the problem was, and how to deal with it. The problem occurs when I use "--" in any text and then enclose that text in HTML comment delimiters (<!-- ... -->). If there are any "--" in the enclosed text, HTML "interprets" them as the end of the comment.

Explanation: Referring to <!-- and --> as the HTML comment delimiters is inaccurate. A more accurate statement is that < and > are the HTML tag delimiters, and !-- and -- are the comment delimiters which work as comment delimiters only within an HTML tag.

I don't entirely blame myself for misinterpreting HTML comment delimiters, because I found several other pages which referred to <!-- and --> as the HTML comment delimiters. Also, IIRC, some browsers showed the problem and some did not.

This page could be deleted, as the above explanation exists elsewhere (in different words). Maybe we should leave this page here for a month or so and then delete it?

<text of the old page:>

See MozillaBugWrongCommentMarker.

On hold -- I'm not getting the results I expected yet, and I may have to paste in the entire page that demonstrated the problem and then start deleting stuff to make the minimum example. (Clearly though, there is something wrong even at this point (for my Mozilla 1.1), as I cannot see the last paragraph on this page (which starts "There is a line above this one ...").

PS: This page works fine (displays as (I) expected on IE5.5 on Win95).

PPS: I've experimented a little by separating the comment markers from the text by nothing, a space, and a newline. Makes no difference in Mozilla -- did not try the same tests in IE.

PPPS: As another potential clue, when I did not include anything after the end of comment marker (my signature and the last paragraph were added later), the page is not saved. This is the first hint to me that maybe TWiki has something to do with the problem. (It's not a strong hint / feeling, just a(nother) surprising result, and the idea that TWiki won't save the page brings TWiki into my field of suspicion. If I had an easy way to attempt a test page with pure HTML (i.e., not from TWiki) I should do so. (Hmm, I guess I could try that on my personal (behind a firewall web server), but that's another thing I don't want to take the time for.

I'll keep this page as test page 1, and create another test page 2 (MozillaBugWrongCommentMarkerTest2) starting with the page that first demonstrated the problem.

There is a line above this one that says "you should not see this -- and you should not see this" within HTML comment markers. If you see any portion of the line, your browser has the bug I'm talking about. (You should see this paragraph, but as either another manifestation of the same bug, or a different bug, I do not see it.)

-- RandyKramer - 16 Jan 2003

Totally irrelevant comment -- check out the bread crumb trail on this sucker, and note that Wikilearn.BugTriagerPositions is on the Wikilearn web.