After getting weird HTML validation errors today we had a look at the http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd and it seems like it's broken!

Is it just me? The DTD contains things like

With a comment closing sign, but no opening. Validators fail with an error on the first entity declaration, "HTML.Version".

Unless someone's playing tricks on us with a funny proxy or cache in between, this is weird and must have broken quite a few programs on the web today...have you seen it as well?

(DTDs broken on w3c.org?? This is one of these "I might be going to look silly" posts..but it looks true ;-)

Update: comments are enabled on this post now, sorry about that

Update: Simone Gianni mailed me the following explanation, thanks!: it's not broken, in SGML -- is enough for a comment, but I a lot of parsers do not think it is, and generally XML tools do not like it. This is also clearly stated in http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/intro/sgmltut.html#h-3.3. Anyway, a quick compare with a similar but working one (http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd) shows that they changed their mind, and used a more "compliant" way of including comments in other DTDs.