A Dragon in Sheep’s Clothing

Interesting bug I wanted to share with the world….

On my organization’s website, some ColdFusion code was recently added above the HTML of the homepage in order to redirect traffic trying to access a certain subdomain. Before each line of CF code, a standard HTML comment

<!-- Like this -->

was included for future reference.

Well, I know (now) that ColdFusion comments must have 3 dashes instead of two. Oddly, the only hint of an error we got from the 2-dash comment code was that it caused IE 6.x to ignore the cascading stylesheet alignments which centered the content, rendering all the content left-aligned. Everything else that the stylesheet controlled on the homepage was unaffected. (The stylesheet didn’t change either.)

Of course, the problem was fixed when we used 3 dashes instead of 2 in the comment code.

You’d think that Dreamweaver would highlight the 2-dash comment as invalid when editing a Coldfusion (.cfm) file, yes? But it didn’t.

And Firefox did not have any problems no matter which way the comments were formatted.