A message that looks like bad HTML programming on Purism Shop

I don’t own a Librem Mini but on the page to consider buying one, there is a message that looks very much like someone tried to comment-out the message with an <!-- HTML comment--> but where the comment is not formatted correctly so the text appears to all shoppers on the page.

Based on my experiences as a customer with other Purism products that say Out of stock, I have a high degree of certainty that if I order this product it will not ship in 10 days.

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You are right. That piece of web site content has all kind of brokenness. (The desired text has been HTML-enquoted so that the comment doesn’t work, and the double-dash has been auto-corrected? / converted? into an en dash character, as would also occur in Discourse i.e. this forum.)

And it won’t ship in 10 days because the Librem Mini is “between versions” i.e. going from v2 to v3, as it says immediately above the text that you highlight.

@JCS

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I suspect the “Note…” text is meant to temporarily replace the text in the attempted comment.

It’s my vague memory that HTML sections are not trivial to comment out, so whoever did this has my sympathy.

Thanks for reporting @Dlonk :person_bowing: I’m not sure how that happened, but I’ve raised it internally to get that fixed.

In any language that does not support nested comments, it can be difficult to comment out arbitrary blocks of source.

On the other hand, for source that is directly exposed to the customer it is probably better to avoid ever deploying source that includes comments (i.e. strip comments, if any, as part of the deployment process) - and then it should be easy enough to comment out an arbitrary block of source in the deployed source. But, for HTML, watch out for CDATA sections. :wink:

Of course in the case of HTML you really ought to comment out a subtree of the HTML document (e.g. from a tag to its matching end-tag) but then browsers tend to be fairly forgiving if the result of commenting out some HTML is not technically correct any more.

So, yes, that’s three complications right there.