Is it possible to prevent standard HTML comments from showing up in source code?

Question

I'm going to assume the answer is 'no' here, but since I haven't actually found that answer, I'm asking.

Quite basically, all I want to do is leave some HTML commenting in my files for 'author eyes only', simply to make editing the file later a much more pleasant experience.

<!-- Doing it like this --> leaves nice clean comments but they show up when viewing the page source after output.

I am using PHP, so technically I could <?PHP /* wrap comments in PHP tags */ ?> which would prevent them from being output at all, but if possible I'd like to avoid all of the extra arbitrary PHP tagging that would be needed for commenting throughout the file. After all, the point of commenting is to make the document feel less cluttered and more organized.

Is there anything else I could try or are these my best options?

Answer 1

No, anything in html will show up.

You could, have a script that parses the code, and removes the comments, before it puts it up on the server, and then you would have the original, and the uncommented source.

A tool to accomplish this: http://code.google.com/p/htmlcompressor/