PCDATA

[Hunter, David]

I would tend to go with the definition Tim Bray gave in the Annotated XML
Spec from XML.com (located at http://www.xml.com/axml/axml.html), which Mr.
Laurent's definition agrees with:

<quote>
#PCDATA Means What?
An observant reader wrote in to say that while the grammar makes clear that
the keyword #PCDATA is used to signal mixed content, the spec says nothing
about where that magic word comes from. The # is there because it can't be
used in a Name, so #PCDATA could never be the type of a child element. The
string PCDATA itself stands for "Parsed Character Data". It is another
inheritance from SGML; in this usage, "parsed" means that the XML processor
will read this text looking for markup signaled by < and & characters.
</quote>

Hope this helps.

David Hunter
david.hunter at mediaserv.com
MediaServ Information Architects
http://www.MediaServ.com


-----Original Message-----
From: John Martin [mailto:John.Martin at ncmail.net]
Sent: Monday, July 19, 1999 3:07 PM
To: xml-dev at ic.ac.uk
Subject: PCDATA


I have heard three different definitions of PCDATA so far.

1)  The book called XML: A Primer by Simon St. Laurent defines it as
follows:

"parsed character data (#PCDATA)" - Parsed character data is text that
will be examined by the parser for entities and markup.  Parsed
character data should not contain any &, <, or > characters; these need
to be represented by the &amp; &lt; and &gt; entities, respectively.

2)  Microstar's Near & Far Designer defines it in its help screen as
follows:

"Processable Character Data (PCDATA)" - Indicates content that can be
analyzed and processed.  Mark-up entities will be recognized within the
text.

3)  A colleague of mine swears he saw it defined as "printable character
data," but can't remember where he saw it.

What's up with this?  :)

Thanks!
John



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