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Gathering and replying to several comments: >By the same argument, > <p > x="1"> >and > <p x="1"> > are different, because the author used them. The concept of ignorable whitespace also permits individual applications to _not_ ignore it, I believe. >Again, is anyone aware of why CDATA is preserved by the DOM? CDATA exists in the first place because some folks are working with applications that are displeased by having to juggle character-entity references when representing textual data that conflicts with XML syntax. Consider an XML editor which is creating an XHTML page with embedded dynamic scripting. One can argue that outputting a<b in that script code as a<b ought to be fine, since the browser's parser should convert it back before handing the code off to the interpreter. On the other hand, it adversely affects human-readability of the XML file. And part of the point of using XML rather than binary representations is that the files should be reasonably human-readable. If you don't like it, you can ignore it; in an OO language, the DOM makes CDATASection a subclass of Text; you can simply treat it as Text and never know the difference. But when you write the file back out, it will still be in the CDATA wrapper, unless you explicitly take action to defeat that. Much of this is the "source-level debugging problem" applied to data. It's generally a bad idea to unconditionally discard human-generated information unless you _know_ it will never be meaningful to any downstream processing stage. It's fine for applications to request that it be discarded, or discard it themselves; they have enough information to do so. Support routines should be able to pass data through unchanged unless configured or instructed to do otherwise. ______________________________________ Joe Kesselman / IBM Research Unless stated otherwise, all opinions are solely those of the author. xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1 To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; (un)subscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...)
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