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

• From: Chris Lovett <clovett@m...>
• To: 'Michael Kay' <M.H.Kay@e...>, XML Dev <xml-dev@i...>
• Date: Fri, 30 Oct 1998 19:04:12 -0800

For what it's worth, the MS-XML parser also fails to validate the CDATA
example because it takes the view that '<![CDATA[  ]]>' is not a
replacement-text-entity and therefore the characters '<![' do NOT match the
whitespace production.  If this is replaced with the entity &ws; defined as
<!ENTITY ws "  "> MSXML will will validate.  The reason is that we figured
that we have to expand entities anyway for validation purposes because you
can also do the following:

<!DOCTYPE a [
    <!ELEMENT a (b, c)>
    <!ELEMENT b EMPTY>
    <!ELEMENT c EMPTY>
    <!ENTITY ent "<b/><c/>">
  ]>
<a>&ent;</a>

It doesn't make any sense to think of the contents of a CDATA section in
terms of "replacement-text" because then you'd have to wonder about
validating <![CDATA[<b/><c/>]]> which was NOT the point of CDATA sections.
The point of CDATA was to treat <b/><c/> as UNPARSED text.

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