On Tue, May 12, 2009 at 4:36 PM, Dan Allen <dan.j.allen@gmailcom> wrote:

On Tue, May 12, 2009 at 3:47 PM, Martin Marinschek <mmarinschek@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></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></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.

I should also mention that Facelets interpolates EL in comments (when they are not skipped) which almost always surprises developers. I would guess that with <h:outputComment> the EL would be interpolated since the intent is to render the content. That would be consistent. You almost never want Faclets to interpolate EL in a developer comment (not rendered)

-Dan