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Documents within documents

• To: <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: Documents within documents
• From: "Michael Kay" <michael.h.kay@n...>
• Date: Thu, 7 Feb 2002 12:13:13 -0000
• Importance: Normal
• Reply-to: <michael.h.kay@n...>

I'm seeing an increasing tendency for people to nest one XML document within
a CDATA section of another XML document. This of course doesn't work well:
you have to make two passes through the XML parser to process the inner
document out; and you get into problems if the inner document contains a
CDATA section, because the ]]> delimiters don't nest.

People end up asking "how can I apply a transformation to the inner
document", and my usual response is the rather lame "I wouldn't start from
here if I were you".

The usual excuse for doing it seems to be that the inner document has a
<!DOCTYPE..> declaration that people want to preserve while carrying an XML
document over some protocol like SOAP.

Is there a better solution that we can point them to?

Michael Kay
Software AG
home: Michael.H.Kay@n...
work: Michael.Kay@s...

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