I'm in the middle of fixing a long standing bug where the spacing around the beginning and end of lists is not consistent. Not sure what you're referring to because there are no HTML comment tags in my message. Did you perhaps see the pre-edit version where a bug let some malformed HTML comment tags creep through?
Here's an example of the bug showing inconsistent vertical spacing, using the unmodified code on this server. It was originally this:
[face=Verdana][noparse]Beginning of list
[list]
[*]List A Line 1
[*]List A line 2
[/list]
End of list
Beginning of list
[list]
[*]List B Line 1
[*]List B line 2
[/list]
End of list[/noparse][/face]
But when translated the vertical spacing becomes uneven:
Beginning of list
- List A Line 1
- List A line 2
End of list
Beginning of list
- List B Line 1
- List B line 2
End of list
I'm fixing the bug over on the cloud server that we'll be moving to soon, but I've got the cloud server using the database here, which is why you're seeing the messages I'm using for debugging. While you'll be able to see my testing, you won't be able to take advantage of any of my fixes until I complete them and install them here in the current software. I originally planned just to get the cloud server going, but then decided I'd just fix this one teensy bug only to discover that it's a little more complicated than I originally projected.
You're right about the code that translates the dBCodes into HTML taking advantage of HTML comments. That's so the original form of the message can be restored for editing purposes. For instance, "[list]" gets translated to this when composing a message or when it's stored in the database:
<!--UB [list] --><ul type=disc><!--UE-->
When a message is edited the original form must be restored. I could have instead stored the entire original message in the database, but I thought that since in most messages the dBCodes are only a small portion that HTML comments added to the original message would take up much less database space. When restoring the message as originally composed with dBCodes the text between UB and UE comments disappears while text embedded in the UB comment is restored, then the comments are removed. A CBR comment is translated to a line break,
, which helps restore the original vertical formatting.
When messages are presented as part of a thread all the HTML comments are filtered out in the interests of efficiency by transmitting fewer characters. This decision was made around 17 years ago, but with today's Internet speeds I'm not sure it matters anymore. But it means if you do "View Page Source" that you should see no HTML comments in the messages. However, while composing a message the HTML comments are left in place and you can use "View Source Code" to get a better idea of how it works. But it's pretty boring stuff, actually. I'm just glad I was able to make it work. dBoard software performs better formatting of messages than other discussion board offerings, like vBulletin.
--Percy