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Re: CDATA sections in W3C XML Infoset

• From: Tim Bray <tbray@t...>
• To: XML-Dev Mailing List <xml-dev@l...>
• Date: Fri, 30 Mar 2001 14:35:38 -0800

At 10:54 AM 30/03/01 -0500, Bob Kline wrote:
>No?  We have quite a bit of code in our XML repository which uses XML
>commands over sockets for its client-server interface to the rest of the
>world.  Most of the commands embed an XML document being stored in or
>retrieved from the repository.  The embedded documents are wrapped in
>CDATA sections.  The logic for extracting a document from an incoming
>client command is essentially:
>
>   Find the element containing the CDATA section.
>   Find the CDATA child of the element.
>   Hand the value of the CDATA section to the parser.

This seems really questionable.  Using CDATA sections to embed
other XML that's known not to contain any seems just fine.
On the other hand, relying on that CDATA section to tell you
where it is smells bad.  Wouldn't it have been immensely
better to do

<mydoc>...
  <included-doc><![CDATA[ <something-else /> .. 
  ]]></included-doc> ...
</mydoc>

Then the CDATA does what it's supposed to, simplify
escaping, and the tags do what they're supposed to,
provide semantic markup saying what pieces of text
really are.  -Tim

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