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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-13T08:58:18+00:00

What is the benefit to add CSS code in comments? <STYLE type="text/css"> <!– H1

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What is the benefit to add CSS code in comments?

<STYLE type="text/css">
<!--
   H1 { color: red }
   P  { color: blue}
   -->
</STYLE>

Should we use this always or isn’t there any need? Is it same like CDATA for JavaScript?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    It’s archaic cruft meant to support HTML 2.0 browsers from 15-odd years ago. Those browsers didn’t know about the <script> and <style> tags, so unless the content inside them was hidden inside comment markup, it would spit them out onto the page as text content, causing a nasty mess.

    There is absolutely no purpose to the practice today, but still it hangs on, thanks to cut-and-paste coding and poor authoring tools like Dreamweaver.

    In XHTML served as XML you must not include the comment markup, otherwise your script or stylesheet really is only a comment and will be completely ignored.

    Some authors use a <![CDATA[ ... ]]> section for scripts and stylesheets in XHTML, but this is for a completely different reason. It allows you to include a literal < or & character inside the content without having to do the correct XML thing and escape it to &lt; or &amp;. Apart from making code harder to read, an HTML-escape in scripts and styles would confuse legacy non-XML HTML parsers: in HTML4, the script and style elements are magic and can have those characters in without escaping (the one sequence you can’t use is </ since that ends the element).

    When you do use a CDATA section in a document you intend to be read by non-XML HTML parsers, you should use a CSS or JavaScript comment to hide the CDATA section markup:

    <script type="text/javascript">//<![CDATA[
    ...
//]]></script>

<style type="text/css">/* <![CDATA[ */
    ...
/* ]]> */</style>

    For the old-school comment-wrapping common in HTML 3.2, an exception was made to CSS and JS parsing to allow <!-- and --> sequences to slip through unnoticed, but this is not the case for <![CDATA[ or ]]> which would be seen by a CSS or JavaScript parser as a syntax error.

    If, heaven forbid, you needed to support HTML 2.0, 3.2+ and XHTML parsers, you’d end up needing this hideous mess:

    <script type="text/javascript"><!--//--><![CDATA[//><!--
    ...
//--><!]]></script>

<style type="text/css"><!--/*--><![CDATA[/*><!--*/
    ...
/*]]>*/--></style>

    thankfully this is never going to happen.

    You can usually get away with no comment or CDATA cruft at all, since CSS almost never needs to use the < or & characters, and in JavaScript you can usually recast less-than comparisons as harmless >, and logical-ands to inverted logical-ors. Both CSS and JavaScript offer native escapes for when you want to put a < or & character in a string literal (eg. '\x3C').

    In any case, significant amounts of style and script — where you’re most likely to want to use those characters — should generally be in an external linked file, making the point moot.

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