<XML:SCRIPT>

[David Megginson]

Simon St.Laurent writes:

 > I understand CDATA sections; I'm just depressed and fairly cranky
 > that people still consider them a worthwhile tool that deserves
 > regular use.  Yecch.  To think at one time I thought hiding
 > JavaScript inside comments to shield it from old browsers was ugly.

They're not quite the same -- CDATA sections simply shift the parsing
mode, so that the only delimiter recognised is "]]>" (or "]]").  That
said, they are purely lexical and somewhat unattractive, and exist
only as a convenience for people who write XML in regular text
editing tools.

Once there are XML editing tools in wide-spread use, they will
probably hide this, so naive authors will just type

  if (x < y && a > b) {
    ...
  }

and the editing software will write it to the XML file as

  if (x &lt; y &amp;&amp; a &gt; b) {
    ...
  }


All the best,


David

-- 
David Megginson                 david at megginson.com
           http://www.megginson.com/

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