CDATA by any other name... (was The raw and the cooked)

[Richard Tobin]

One reason to regard a CDATA section as equivalent to the characters
in it is that it is prefectly reasonable for a processor to transform
a CDATA section into plain character data with character entities
where required.  A processor that outputs canonical XML will do this.

Suppose we regard <![CDATA[ ]]> as invalid in element-only content.
If the processor is non-validating, it will not check this, and
will produce valid output from invalid input.

You might for example run a document through such a processor merely
to change its character encoding.  It would be unfortunate if this
process changed the document's validity.

Slightly less plausibly, a processor might decide to output all character
data as CDATA sections to avoid using character entities.  This process
could make a valid document invalid.

-- Richard

xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev at ic.ac.uk
Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/
To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo at ic.ac.uk the following message;
(un)subscribe xml-dev
To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo at ic.ac.uk the following message;
subscribe xml-dev-digest
List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa at ic.ac.uk)