If you take anything away from this rant, please remember this - use comment tags whenever possible. These simple things can save you hours of headache while your editing your templates and are most helpful months after you've edited your pages and you return to them again.
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What Is A Comment Tag?
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Simply put, comment tags are good for leaving yourself or others notes explaining just what is was they you were attempting to do. It's used so you can make notes to yourself or for someone viewing your code. The best part is that it will not show up on the visitors browser.
The comment tag begins with "<!--" and ends with "-->". Anything in between will be commented out. So, put it all together and your comment would look like this, "<!-- this is a comment tag -->". You can find out more information about comment tags at this link.
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How Do You Use Them?
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How you use them is entirely up to you. You can place them anywhere you like and they won't impact your pages at all. I use them any chance I get.
For starters, I recommend using them before and after a section of code. For example, I typically follow this format:
<!-- comment tag -->
bunch of code goes here
<!-- /comment tag -->
The <!-- /comment tag --> tells me that that particular section of code is "over" and so anything I edit between those two tags will affect that section. A better example, might be:
<!-- welcome panel -->
All the welcome panel code goes here
<!-- /welcome panel -->
With the above example, it's easy to see that the all the code for the welcome panel is included in between the two comment tags.
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Where Do You Use Them?
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Again, that's really up to you. If you're familar with HTML, then I'd suggest that you consider placing them before each major section of code, or any place where you feel it might be helpful.
To help illustrate how I use comment tags, I've attached the postbit template that I use on the NPUG Forums. When looking at the code in a text editor, you can easily see where each part of the postbit resides in the code.
I highly recommend that you place a comment tag at the start and end of each major template. This way, when you view the source from your browser, you can see how each template comes together when fully rendered through vB.
Yea this is helpfull if you are creating a large mod cause when your done you'll have to shift through all the templates to find exactly what you modified. I myself should use it more often cause sometimes I dont preach what I say and end up scattering around the template. Nice tip, everyone should consider doing.
09-09-2002, 10:00 PM
09-12-2002, 02:16 AM
