Unnecessary HTML comments in the comments walker.

[edent]

When wp_list_comments() uses the ul or ol style, the source-code of the page becomes littered with <!-- .children --> and <!-- #comment-## -->

These are caused by ​class-walker-comment.php#L91 and ​#L238

This was ​introduced in 2013 with the comment "Some helpful HTML comments to help untangle the HTML".

I'm not sure what utility these HTML comments add. They aren't targetted by any existing code that I can find. The HTML produced is fairly straightforward and doesn't need untangling.

I plan to send a PR to remove the HTML comments from the output - unless anyone has strong feelings otherwise?

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[edent]

Similarly, there's an unnecessary <!-- #respond --> at ​comment-template.php#L2901

Possibly caused by ​https://github.com/WordPress/WordPress/commit/919f08fd2d15bc831a9f40daf0a52bc00f93bf64

Again, I propose removing it.

[SergeyBiryukov]

Hi there, thanks for the ticket!

Replying to edent:

Similarly, there's an unnecessary <!-- #respond --> at ​comment-template.php#L2901

Introduced in [14092] / #13016.

Personally, I don't see any harm in keeping these comments as is, they seem helpful to determine which element the closing tag corresponds to, especially with multiple </div> or </ul> tags on the page.