web developers commonly use html comments (<--) inside of script blocks hoping to prevent the display of the script in some browsers. Mozilla appears to treat html comments inside script blocks as code comments. Will attach testcase.

added 4xp and nsbeta2 keywords.

changing --> to //--> in the testcase fixes the problem. see also http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/interact/scripts.html#h-18.3.2

The page appears to operate correctly (when compared to nav4). Can someone tell me what the problem actually is?

Type anything into the text field. Clicking on resetForm1 clears the field, but resetForm2 doesn't (with a pull from the tip 5/30). In nav4 and IE, resetForm2 does clear the field (even though the HTML comment is not js commented).

The issue: 1) JS spec says that <!-- should be treated as a JavaScript comment, and that <!-- and //--> should be used to enclose JavaScript code to prevent non-JS browsers and browsers with JS turned off from displaying script as content. (Note the mandatory // JavaScript comment in the closer.) Nav4/IE5/Moz5-15 all handle this perfectly, & I'm attaching a second testcase demonstrating that. 2) Reporter has discovered in his testcase (and I've confirmed) that Nav4 and IE5 both had a quirk in which they tolerated the use of --> as the closer instead of //-->. This is not correct JavaScript syntax, but since Nav4 and IE5 both tolerated it, I think we can safely assume there's tons of JS out there that makes this mistake, and that we had better tolerate this in Moz in quirks mode. Setting to [nsbeta2+][6/15]. Reassigning to harishd@netscape.com since this is a parser quirks issue.

This is certainly not a parser issue. As far as parser is concerned contents within SCRIPT are CDATA. However, in quirks mode we do scan for '-->' when '<!--' is encountered. But, it's not up to the parser to resolve JS errors,i.e., the parser cannot insert '//' ( for this bug ) to solve the problem. This problem should be addressed in the JS engine. Over to Roger.

*** Bug 36122 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

I get an error when I load the first attachment http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/showattachment.cgi?attach_id=9160 into 4.7 JavaScript Error: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/showattachment.cgi?attach_id=9160, line 14: syntax error. --> ..^ And I am sure I have encountered various pages (notable from microsoft.com) with the same error where NN4 always showed that error. So I don't think we can say NN4 tolerates the error. You might get lucky that the function already parsed is around after the error stops further js interpretation. But I am sure I have encountered various pages where NN4 first reported that error and then further errors occured when trying to access objects defined in that incorrectly closed script block. So I think it is an IE only quirk. And mozilla doesn't need to follow it.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 31255 ***

Verified duplicate.