FW: XML Mail

[Borden, Jonathan]

John Cowan wrote:
>
>
> Robert Hanson wrote:
>
> > Am I wrong in saying that the answer would be that the symbol
> ">" should not
> > show up in the non-XML text anyway?  Wouldn't it be converted
> to an entity
> > reference?  Like this...
> >
> > "]]>" in the text body would become "]]>"

	This is of course how the text "]]>" would be escaped in a text block. The
issue of dealing with "]]>" arises when we are in a CDATA block. In this
case "]]>" remains CDATA, so John's suggestion about creating two CDATA
sections is a good one.

>
> The point was that conversions like ">" becomes ">" aren't
> necessary if you use CDATA sections, only the one bad case of
> "]]>" which is illegal in plain XML character data as well as
> terminating the CDATA section, and so must become something like
> "]]]]><![CDATA[<", which is "]]" followed by "]]>" to end the
> CDATA section plus "<![CDATA[" to start another CDATA section
> plus ">".  There are other ways to do it, of course.
>
> --

	What I have done in XMTP is to CDATA all text based non-xml bodies (i.e.
mime:BODY) but escape the text nodes of mime headers. e.g. Message-ID:
<sample at somewhere> becomes:

<Message-ID >&lt;sample at somewhere&gt;</Message-ID >

as opposed to:

<Message-ID ><[CDATA[<sample at somewhere>]]></Message-ID >

just because, at the moment, this results in an average slightly larger
document (granted just a few bytes) and also because of vague stylistic
leanings. The best reason to <[CDATA[ the bodies is that it makes looking at
enclosed HTML ever so much easier.

Is there a good reason to prefer one over the other for headers?

Jonathan Borden
http://jabr.ne.mediaone.net


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