Scripting and XML

Sean Mc Grath digitome at iol.ie
Sun Oct 19 11:46:40 BST 1997


>[Simon St.Laurent]
>>but it would be a heck of a lot easier to be able to 
>>declare <!ELEMENT SCRIPT CDATA>
>
[Tim Bray]
>Well, it would if the SGML CDATA element idea actually worked.  But it
>doesn't, because the contents of a CDATA element are terminated by
>any <, or is it </, I forget at the moment, but anyhow, you can't,
>in practical terms, use CDATA elements for anything useful.  If you
>could, they'd be in XML. 
>
>For now, stick with <![CDATA[ ... ]]> - anybody who can't implement
>this properly is a bozo. -T.
>
Steady on! Marked sections have their own magic terminator "]]>".
The is no foolproof mechanism involving a magic terminator string
comments,. PIs, CDATA MS, CDATA declared content all suffer
to varying degrees.

The Unix HEREIS document concept adddresses similar problems.
It allows the terminating string to be specified on a case by case basis. If
SGML allowed
such a specification at the start of a CDATA marked section then
it would be possible to avoid the premature termination issues without
resorting to entity based evisceration of the magic terminiating string.






Sean Mc Grath

sean at digitome.com
Digitome Electronic Publishing
http://www.digitome.com


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