Re: [jsr-314-open] Facelets: XHTML vs. XML

On Tue, May 12, 2009 at 3:47 PM, Martin Marinschek <mmarinschek(a)apache.org > wrote: > Hi Andy, > > one more issue which _always_ comes up with people working with > facelets and of course also stems from the same root-cause is the > comment-problem - how can you correctly have comments for facelets and > comments for the output? > > The way we currently do this is either set SKIP_COMMENTS to true - > which effectively disallows HTML comments - or use ui:remove to make > parts of the page Facelets-comments. However, the second approach > doesn't allow invalid XML-snippets inside the ui:remove section - and > this can be a very annoying thing then. > > Maybe it would be better to set SKIP_COMMENTS to true by default - and > then have an <h:outputComment> for emitting HTML comments (I believe > the problem of invalid XML in HTML-comments is not as big as in > comments which are meant to be there for facelets). Martin, you have struck a very strong chord with me. I was just dealing with this exact issue all week. To create a real Facelets comment, putting SKIP_COMMENTS aside, I have to do: <ui:remove><!-- I'm thinking of using <rich:dataTable> but I haven't added the RichFaces libraries yet. --></ui:remove> To me, that seems like complete overkill. I would much prefer if Facelets just stayed out of comments and like Martin said, we consider producing a comment with a tag (since producing a comment is extremely rare anyway). I would even support the idea of using comment markers inside the tag so that it is still possible to use invalid XML. <h:outputComment><!-- This is a comment with invalid <<XML>> --></h:outputComment> Of course, the comment markers would be optional...they just allow the template to be well-formed XML if you happen to use invalid markup in the comment.