Invalid HTML causing odd effects

[Jonathan Scott]

I'm getting bits of an invalid HTML comment appearing on the screen at times in Google Chrome. From "View Source" I see that the whole string is as follows:

<!– google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) –>

This is an invalid comment because the dashes should be double. As I'm a contributor I'm not expecting to see any ads anyway. I don't know why Chrome (dev build) is letting bits of it leak into the displayed document, and that might be a bug, but it shouldn't be there anyway.

 

[Jonathan Scott]

I'm also getting similar bits showing from another invalid comment as follows, matching the earlier one:

<!– google_ad_section_end –>

I've now worked out what is going on, in that a browser search on "end ->" did not find the above, and by cutting and pasting it and using debug to look at it in hex I found that what appears at first glance in my Windows browser to be a normal dash is actually an extended ASCII code 150, which is an en-dash in the usual Windows code. I guess someone entered this using a "intelligent" word-processing editor which changes double dash to the Windows en-dash, so it doesn't work as a comment.